Andy Moore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Enterprise Content Management: Size or Strategy?“Enterprise” is a badly misused word, unless you’re Captain Kirk. Alternately applied tomean both “big” and “integrated,” I’m afraid it no longer means either. . . .

Eric Stevens, Hummingbird . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Corporate Governance—What Enterprise Content Management Was Meant ForOrganizations throughout the world have successfully deployed a range of enterprisecontent management (ECM) solutions to address organizational needs. . . .

Dan Ryan, Stellent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Six Ways ECM Can Work for Your BusinessUnstructured content has doubled in the last three years. As a result, the challenge ofmanaging and effectively leveraging this tremendous volume of content across an enterprisecontinues to grow. . . .

Jeffrey Klein, First Consulting Group. . . . . . 8 ECM Best Practices for the Enlightened EnterpriseInformation overload in the life sciences industry is driving a pressing need for bettercontent management. Companies are overwhelmed by content. . . .

Tom Jenkins, Open Text. . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 ECM: Making Process PossibleOver the past few years, ECM has emerged as a defined enterprise software category,one that is clearly capturing more and more attention. . . .

Ethan Eisner, LexisNexis . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Maximize User Satisfaction: Five Steps to ECM SuccessWe have all experienced, or heard from colleagues, the horror stories…The good news isthat we can learn from these past experiences. . . .

Robert Weideman, ScanSoft. . . . . . . . . . 14 Better PDF for BusinessThe single greatest challenge to streamlining document-based processes in business isthe fact that there are two incompatible dominant electronic document formats. . . .

Johannes Scholtes, ZyLAB . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Affordability in Content Management and ComplianceThe impetus on organizations to be transparent and fiscally prudent continues to intensify,motivated by the constant drive for more competitive efficiency. . . .

Robert Liscouski, Content Analyst . . . . . . 18 Rising to the Real-World Challenges of ECMInitial efforts to implement ECM systems already have demonstrated the potential forachieving significant benefits. . . .

Vernon Imrich, Percussion Software . . . . . 20 Champagne Tastes on a Beer Budget: ECM for the Rest of UsThe key to getting a champagne feature set at a beer budget lies in considering how anECM solution is delivered in addition to what features it advertises. . . .

David White, Arbortext . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Automated Publishing is More Than ECMWhat defines a formal publishing process? When should an organization consider adopting an automated approach to publishing? If your content has one or more of thefollowing characteristics. . . .

Bill Rogers, Ektron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 New Realities for Mid-Market Content and Document Management Mid-size organizations have frequently found themselves “stuck in the middle” when it comesto finding the right solution for effectively managing, publishing and sharing online content. . . .

George Viebeck, EMC Documentum . . . . . 23 Managing High Volumes of Data in SAPCompanies are deluged by application data and documents. Some analysts say this datais growing at 80% per year. . . .

Charles Hough, Interwoven . . . . . . . . . 24 A Service-Oriented Architecture for Better ECMNew business requirements are changing the way companies think about enterprise software. Initiatives and objectives increasingly cross traditional boundaries. . . .

A. J. Hyland, Hyland Software . . . . . . . . 25 ECM for Accounts Payable: It Pays—Faster!Why would I want to pay my bills faster? That’s the question some people ask when wetalk about the value of using ECM software, such as document imaging. . . .

Todd Peters, PaperThin . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 What You DON’T Know About Web Content ManagementAs digital content continues to grow at an exponential rate, organizations increasingly struggle with ways to affordably and efficiently create and manage content on the Web. . . .

Best Practices in Enterprise Content Management

KMWorldSupplement to

Premium Sponsors

May 2005

value propositions to be gained froman “enterprise” implementation?

Jeff Klein, First Consulting Group: Theterm “enterprise” used to refer to size andscale—“how big could it get?” But now,“enterprise” truly means what it shouldmean—a company-wide strategy. WhereERP and CRM systems were enterprise bytheir introductory nature, content manage-ment has grown into that, from departmen-tal up to enterprise.

Tom Jenkins, Open Text: For the past 20years, there have been things we called“enterprise something”—EDMS, ECM.But that was a misnomer, because it wasalmost always actually deployed at adepartment level. It was quite rare for any-thing to go right across the enterprise.

Over the past two years, that has begunto change, mostly because of compliance.When you’re in a regulatory environment,you can’t really leave any part of the enter-prise out. Thanks to regulatory compliance,there’s been a convergence of documentmanagement, Web content managementand records. This was probably going tohappen anyway, but it’s been accelerated.The point is: the promise is starting tomatch up with the reality.

George Viebeck, Documentum: The equa-tion has changed. There have always beenmany departmental point solutions that arenow being viewed with an overall enter-prisewide vision of a platform of servicesthat enables not only individual solutions,but also strives for something beyond that.

Customers are leveraging corporate ITacross multiple business problems to get themaximum value out of their content. Perhapsthe key issue is the ability to integrate withenterprise-packaged applications. Customersalready use an SAP or PeopleSoft or Oracleapplication to automate business process-es...now they need to figure out how to bestsupport those with ECM.

For instance, there is a lot of product-centric information developed upstream,such as R&D documents and tech draw-ings, that can be re-used downstream forcall center support, marketing material, etc.That’s the key value provided by ECM—content reusability across the enterprise.

Ethan Eisner, LexisNexis: I agree thatcompliance is the primary driver.Whenever you have to mitigate risk andthere’s no other alternative, companies willtake action. But the greatest value-addition(brought by CM) is strategic. Wheneveryou increase efficiency and can shareknowledge across multiple business unitsor departments, the productivity implica-tions are enormous, and often outweigh—in terms of potential dollar value—anyother reason to embark on this.

Andrew Pery, Hummingbird: The empiri-cal data tell you that, first and foremost, thedriver for ECM is efficiency improve-ment—organizations are not hiring greatnumbers of new people, but the amount ofunstructured data is growing dramatically.

A closely coupled issue is risk mitiga-tion. You have to have a scalable contentrepository to house unstructured informa-tion in order to comply with today’s rigor-ous standards. Customers are asking: “How

Supplement to

Enterprise Content Management

Size or Strategy?

“Enterprise” is a badly misused word,unless you’re Captain Kirk. Alternatelyapplied to mean both “big” and “integrat-ed,” I'm afraid it no longer means either. Butbeyond parlor-game semantics, does it real-ly matter? Why should anyone care whether“enterprise” means anything at all?

Because the current concepts surround-ing what is “enterprise” and what is nothave direct implications for not only largecorporations, but also mid-size to smallorganizations. We’re well past the pointwhere the term “enterprise content manage-ment” (ECM) can be easily dismissed as anifty marketing collateral adjective.

ECM means something now, and ismeaning more and more as time goes by.Recently, I caught up with several executivesfrom companies associated with contentmanagement. Their current assignmentsmay be diverse, but their insights added upto an essential portrait of the ECM marketpast, present and future:

1. Let’s talk about the notion of “enter-prise.” It IS an overused term, buteach of you identify an “enterprise-wide” deployment of content manage-ment as a central strategy. First of all,what do we really mean by the word“enterprise,” and what are the true

May 2005S2 KMWorld

By Andy Moore, Editorial Director, KMWorld Specialty Publishing Group

The CastPG BartlettVice President of Product Marketing, Arbortext

Roger BradfordCorporate Vice President for Technology, Senior Scientist, ContentAnalyst Company

Ethan EisnerVP of Marketing and Strategy for Corporate & Federal Markets, LexisNexis

Tom JenkinsCEO, Open Text

Jeff KleinVice President, Product Strategy & Business Development, FirstConsulting Group

Andrew PeryWorldwide Marketing Manager, Hummingbird

Dan RyanExecutive VP, Marketing and Business Development, Stellent

Dr. Johannes C. ScholtesPresident and CEO, ZyLAB North America

George ViebeckSenior Product Manager, Documentum

Robert WeidemanSenior Vice President, Marketing & Product Strategy, ProductivityApplications, ScanSoft

May 2005 S3

do I consolidate my distributed contentrepositories into a single virtual repository?How do I organize it? How do I effectivelymanage the metadata around it?”

The third business driver is competitiveadvantage. The typical factors of produc-tion—capital, raw materials—are prettymuch equally available to everyone. So whatthey really have to leverage is their humancapital. Because of this, there has been a ren-aissance of knowledge management.

PG Bartlett, Arbortext: Deploying a com-mon IT infrastructure across the enterprisemakes sense, and it’s all the more critical forthe organization’s unstructured information,which represents 80% of the volume and95% of the value. Most importantly, enter-prise deployments make it vastly easier toconnect disparate parts of the organization,allowing collaboration and reuse to bridgeformer islands of information.

Johannes Scholtes, ZyLAB: I’m not veryconvinced that an enterprise implementationis always the most cost-effective approach.We’ve seen very different types of busi-ness processes and very different require-ments...some of the departments want to dostraightforward searching of static archives,where other departments have very complexWeb content management requirements andcomplex workflows. Sometimes it’s better touse different solutions for those differentapplications. If you have a hammer, notevery problem is a nail.

Jeff Klein, First Consulting Group: Is ittactical or strategic? Depends. In the R&Ddiscovery phase, the access to knowledgeyou didn’t know existed is important. In themanufacturing and distribution of thatproduct, the ability to have all the knowl-edge you expect to find is more valuable. Itdepends on where you are in the cycle...butboth are central to the theme of enterprisecontent management.

Robert Weideman, ScanSoft: “Enterprise”can mean that every desktop in the organi-zation has a particular application. But itcan also mean the application benefitseveryone in the enterprise. Maybe noteveryone touches the document manage-ment application, but everyone benefitsfrom it.

Dan Ryan, Stellent: There are many moremid-sized companies that are actually doingenterprise content management than largecompanies, by nature of the fact that bigcompanies are departmentalized and politi-cized and spread all over the world.

2. Robert’s remark about who “touches”the ECM application begs the ques-tion of IT versus business units—whomakes the key decisions regardingcontent management deployment,and why?

Andrew Pery, Hummingbird: One of theprimary drivers behind any enterprisewide

adoption of content management will bethe increased role of standards. The abilityto expose the content management systemas a series of services as part of a service-oriented architecture means you don’t haveto throw out pre-existing implementationsof departmental solutions and preservethose investments. This is an IT concern.

Other content integration standards,such as JSR 170, allow you to map intopre-existing content stores and create a vir-tual extraction layer so you can continue tostore information wherever you store itnow, but be able to access it through a stan-dard method. These standards will alsobecome important to IT as a significantcost savings.

Jeff Klein, First Consulting Group: A hugedriver for ECM is the incredibly burden-some support costs, from IT resources,from business-to-IT liaison and from cus-tom and specific solutions that don’t shareany standardization. The costs associatedwith any of these given functions may notbe too great, but added up across an enter-prise...they are.

Robert Weideman, ScanSoft: People cangenerally grasp the benefits that can bederived from ECM, but there have beenbarriers that have kept them from deploy-ing it—mainly the costs of acquisition,deployment and ownership. LeveragingWeb technologies has brought costs down,and those barriers keep falling.

Roger Bradford, Content Analyst Company:There have been plenty of IT innovationsthat died because users voted with their feet.

Dan Ryan, Stellent: A lot of customers rec-ognize they have two, 10, at extremes 100different applications running on the sameplatform. So there’s an awareness thatthere’s a lot of content-centric applications.IT and managers are both saying: “let’smake a standardized decision on what to useas we roll these out in the future.” When cus-tomers look at a digital asset managementsystem or Web content management, theyrealize there’s a 50% to 70% feature-set

that’s the same. So they ask, “Why haveusers learn different systems?”

Most people are not going into contentmanagement in order to replace fileservers; they simply realize that the contentavailable to the organization needs to feedapplications of all kinds. The commonthread is that they’re all content-centric.People are beginning to realize that contentmanagement is the underpinning technolo-gy that supports all those applications.

Johannes Scholtes, ZyLAB: We’ve seen alot of sales cycles where an organizationbought ECM solutions, and the IT depart-ment imposed an architecture on themwhich might not have been what the usersrequired. So whenever people see anopportunity to move away from the enter-prise solution, they buy something depart-mental...you end up in endless political dis-cussions between IT and users.

Robert Weideman, ScanSoft: If peoplecan’t find what they’re looking for, they tendto fall back into the old way of doing things.

3. “User adoption” seems to be a concernthat we’re just touching on...how do you answer the average user’s“what’s in it for me?” question?

Jeff Klein, First Consulting Group:Some people live their entire work day inSiebel—that’s their user experience. In thatsituation, when you need to access docu-ments, content or media, the user experi-ence should still be through Siebel. You dothat through connectors and Web serviceslayers.

But there are some people who livetheir experience in the document manage-ment layer, because that’s their jobs. Theirfunction is to produce that kind of workproduct.

Roger Bradford, Content Analyst Company:The nice thing about content managementis that it’s pretty easy for users to see howit’s helping them. For example, resume-

KMWorldSupplement to

CONVERSATION continues on page 27

“Customers are leveraging corporate IT

across multiple business problems to get

the maximum value out of their content.”

information that governs the organization andhelps to increase the organization’s effective-ness, efficiency and integrity.

The general term for the collection ofprocesses that control the organization is“corporate governance.” When an organiza-tion uses an ECM solution to manage andtrack contracts, it has implemented oneaspect of a governance solution. Every legalor regulatory compliance solution isdesigned to help improve the organization’sability to manage, track and control its gov-ernance-related issues. When a financialservices organization uses a combination ofcollaborative tools and document manage-ment to make it easier for their clients andstaff to work together on a deal, they are per-forming activities that may directly affect theoverall transparency, and therefore the gov-ernance, of the organization.

However, these types of distinct solutionsdo not provide a complete, end-to-end, enter-prise-wide solution to the issues and chal-lenges of corporate governance. To do that,we need to take ECM deployments to the

next level and to think in bigger terms aboutthe information and documents movinginside and outside the organization.

Seeking Governance

Corporate governance is a term thatembodies all of the process, policies, proce-dures and records that an organization uses tomake decisions and carry those decisions out.The OECD, the Organisation for EconomicCo-operation and Development, inPrinciples of Corporate Governance (2004),defines corporate governance as follows:

“Corporate governance involves a setof relationships between a company’smanagement, its board, its shareholdersand other stakeholders. Corporate gov-ernance also provides the structurethough which the objectives of the com-pany are set, and the means of obtainingthose objectives and monitoring per-formance are determined. Good corpo-rate governance should provide properincentives for the board and manage-ment to pursue objectives that are in theinterests of the company and its share-holders and should facilitate effectivemonitoring.”

Corporate governance is not somethingthat is mandated or enforced by governmentsor other regulatory bodies. It is the set of bestpractices that provides for the effective, openand visible management of an organization.While compliance with the applicable legaland regulatory rules is critical to effectivegovernance, many of the new rules havebeen put in place due to the lack, or seeminglack, of visible corporate governance withinmany organizations. Good corporate gover-nance practices lead to better compliance,but more importantly these behaviors lead tobetter organizational operation and increasedshareholder and stakeholder confidence

Supplement to

Corporate Governance—What Enterprise ContentManagement Was Meant For

Organizations throughout the world have suc-cessfully deployed a range of enterprise con-tent management (ECM) solutions to addressmany organizational needs. Companies andgovernments use these solutions to address le-gal and regulatory compliance issues, to sup-port specific business processes, to archive e-mails and to manage their organizationalrecords. With these solutions in place, organi-zations are now wondering: “What is the nextmajor challenge for which ECM can providereal corporate benefit?

The answer to that question can be foundin the solutions that have already been imple-mented at a departmental level by manyorganizations. The type of problems thatenterprise content management has alreadyaddressed provides a critical clue that leadsus to the next major phase of ECM deploy-ment. When we review the processes, docu-ments and records currently managed andcontrolled by ECM-based applications, wecan see a common theme—the majority ofthese applications help organizationsimprove their control over processes and

May 2005S4 KMWorld

Eric Stevens has beeninvolved in all aspectsof the developmentand deployment ofenterprise applicationsfor over 25 years. Hehas helped bothprivate and publicorganizations tounderstand andautomate theirbusiness andorganizational

processes. His background includes imaging, businessprocess automation, enterprise forms and Web-basedapplications. As director of research and strategy forHummingbird, Stevens monitors changes in thetechnology, business and regulatory landscape andhelps to define how Hummingbird solutions need toadapt to best serve its clients.

Eric Stevens

By Eric Stevens, Director, Research and Strategy, Hummingbird Ltd.

ECM provides the foundation for improved communication and interaction amongst all groups affected by governance and compliance issues.

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May 2005 S5

because of the increased visibility and moni-toring that is put in place.

An enterprise content managementsuite has all of the tools to help organiza-tions manage and improve the processesthat are the core of corporate governance.ECM-based document repositories, withfull audit and access controls, ensure thatthe organization’s documents are secureand available. ECM suites also providerecords management— especially disposi-tion—that is critical to the management ofthe important documents and records thatform the foundation of the business. Byensuring that the organization has a set ofpolicies and a process for the identificationof records and their subsequent disposition(along with a secure document repositoryfor active documents) the managementteam and the board of directors can beassured that they have the correct docu-ments and records and that they can com-municate their trust in the information thatthey are providing to all stakeholders.

Knowledge management tools integratedinto an ECM solution provide powerfulsearching capabilities, across many differentrepositories, in order to assist the organiza-tion in finding the right documents, records,policies or procedures. Content-based busi-ness process automation tools allow theorganization to automate, control and trackthe activities that support the organization.Automating the processes is critical, sinceeffective corporate governance is embodiedin the processes. The intention of automatingthe processes is not the elimination of themanual efforts, it’s the ability to track and logthe steps and tasks in the process. This pro-vides the organization with assurance thatthe right activities are happening and allowsfor the effective audit of the process.

Good governance involves effectivecommunication, and ECM solutions pro-vide that through collaborative tools thatallow different groups, such as manage-ment and the board of directors, to shareinformation and produce the documentsthey need. ECM suites can also provideportal tools to facilitate communicationwith internal and external stakeholders,such as employees and shareholders.

Finally, a complete ECM suite providesbusiness intelligence and data transformation

tools that enable the extraction and reportingof information from many other organiza-tional business applications and processes.This adds the value of structured informationto the unstructured information contained inthe documents and ensures that all are pre-sented with all of the information they need,regardless of its source.

ECM-Enabled GovernanceOrganizations that use enterprise con-

tent management to automate, track, man-age, control and monitor all of the docu-ments and processes across their entireenterprise have the opportunity to demon-strate that the organization is abovereproach. It also allows them to gain signif-icant operational efficiencies. What wouldan organization look like if it used enter-prise content management to address all ofthe enterprise-wide processes associatedwith corporate governance? Let’s start withthe board of directors and the executivemanagement of the organization.

The organization would have in place acompletely automated system for the iden-tification of issues and the creation of theagenda for all board meetings. This systemwould ensure that all board membersreceived the required documents with suffi-cient time for their review and for anyquestions to be raised. Management wouldbe able to monitor when documents hadbeen reviewed and auditors would be ableto validate that board members had fullaccess to the correct documents.

The organization would have a sharehold-er correspondence management system inplace, ensuring that all messages from share-holders were recorded, tracked and respond-ed to. The system would ensure that the rightperson is assigned to respond. The designated

responder could use the knowledge manage-ment tool to search all the documents andrecords in the organization to formulate theresponse. The responses would be recordedand tracked, both in substance and in time, tocreate a full audit trail. The system would linkto the agenda and issues management systemso that issues raised by the shareholders couldbe placed on the board’s agenda.

The organization would use one ECMsuite to address all of their compliance-relat-ed issues, even if the information, documentsand records were stored in multiple reposito-ries and databases. The organization wouldsave significant money and time by using onesystem, but it would also allow for a compre-hensive view of the status of all governance-related processes throughout the organiza-tion. Because we are dealing with corporateintegrity, customer assurances and sharehold-er trust, it is critical that the executive andboard of the organization know the “pulse” ofthe company, not just those items that mayhave audit or compliance implications. Thiscomplete view of the status of every processwould allow the organization to take remedi-al action before an issue became a sharehold-er, media or regulatory issue.

The organization would have a completerecords management file plan and wouldalways know that their records could passany audit or review that might be required.The system would also ensure that any doc-ument or record required to respond to ashareholder request or to provide a boardmember with additional information wouldbe available when it was needed.

Corporate governance is important, notonly due to the changed regulatory climatethat all organizations must function intoday, but because letting shareholders,employees, partners and customers knowthat you have the right tools, policies andprocesses in place for good corporate gov-ernance is becoming a crucial advantage.Applying enterprise content managementlets organizations focus on their objectivesand increase the value they bring to all oftheir stakeholders. ❚

Hummingbird Ltd. is a leading global provider of enterprise softwaresolutions, employing more than 1,450 people in 40 offices worldwide.Hummingbird Enterprise™ 2004 is a state-of-the-art integrated enter-prise content management platform that enables organizations tosecurely access and manage business information such as documents,records,e-mail or financial data.Please visit:www.hummingbird.com.

KMWorldSupplement to

“Organizations that use ECM can demonstrate

that the organization is above reproach.”

“What is the next major challenge for which

ECM can provide real corporate benefit?”

management strategy and significant opera-tional efficiencies.

Content management offers functionali-ty to address these business requirements,providing the infrastructure to support com-pliance as well as the applications for man-aging compliance. Specific content manage-ment components that support complianceefforts include: document management,BPM and workflow, reporting and analysisand records management.

Document management enables organi-zations to easily capture, secure, share, dis-tribute, archive and dispose of digital andpaper-based documents and reports via theWeb, helping them reduce risk and lowercosts associated with legal and complianceprocesses. Stellent also provides a DoD5015.2 Chapter 2- and 4-certified system forstreamlining the processes of creating,declaring, classifying, retaining and destroy-ing business records—turning records-based activities into ongoing processes con-veniently and inherently carried out duringthe normal course of business.

Robust e-mail management capabilitiesmake it easier for users to seamlessly

declare e-mail messages and attachmentsas records.

Case in point: Reliant Energy, Inc., aprovider of electricity and energy servic-es, has streamlined its Sarbanes-Oxleycompliance processes by using theStellent Sarbanes-Oxley Solution to cen-trally manage documentation and smoothits attestation process. Specifically, theStellent solution provides Reliant’s corecompliance team with an enterprise-wideview of the company’s internal controlmakeup, allowing the core team to trackcontrol changes and monitor remediationaction plans based upon the remediationpriority.

Multi-Site Web Content ManagementThe multi-site Web content management

problem is growing. Companies are chal-lenged with creating multi-lingual Web sites;building customer and partner extranets; anddeveloping infrastructures for intranets andportals. Combined, these initiatives create theneed to manage hundreds—sometimes thou-sands—of Web sites.

Examples of critical content manage-ment capabilities that support effectivemulti-site management include: Web con-tent management, digital asset managementand document management.

Specifically, Web content manage-ment enables organizations to easily cre-ate and maintain accurate, timely Websites—such as intranets, extranets andpublic Web sites—while ensuring eachsite complies with corporate require-ments and standards. Unique to Stellent’sWeb content management suite is itsStellent Site Studio application, which

Supplement to

Six Ways ECM Can Workfor Your Business

The University of California BerkeleySchool of Information Management andSystems estimates unstructured content,such as spreadsheets, contracts, CAD draw-ings, digital assets and records, has doubledin the last three years. As a result, the chal-lenge of managing and effectively leverag-ing this tremendous volume of contentacross an enterprise continues to grow.

Following are six areas in which an enter-prise content management (ECM) systemcan support and enhance an enterprise: com-pliance and records management; multi-siteWeb content management; ECM consolida-tion; partner and customer extranets; market-ing brand management and digital archiving;and streamlined financial processes.

Compliance and Records Management

Companies are faced with two main typesof compliance: regulatory mandates—such asHIPAA, FDA and ISO—and financial report-ing—such as Sarbanes-Oxley. Tackling com-pliance challenges in a comprehensiveapproach results in a focused enterprise risk

May 2005S6 KMWorld

By Dan Ryan, Executive Vice President, Marketing and Business Development, Stellent

Dan Ryan developsand implementsproduct andmarketing strategiesto expand Stellent'sglobal presence andmarket share and is also responsible for business and corporatedevelopment. Prior tojoining Stellent, Ryanwas vice president of

marketing and business development for FoglightSoftware, where he led the product strategy andmarketing launch of its application performancemanagement system and championed several keystrategic relationships with leading organizationssuch as Oracle, PeopleSoft, Rational Software, CiscoSystems, eBay and Netscape. Ryan spent 14 years insenior marketing and business development positionsat Compact Devices, a leader in the Internetapplication market, and Sync Research, where he wasinstrumental in taking them from a start-up to anestablished wide-area networking company.

Dan Ryan

May 2005 S7

allows companies to maintain a desireddegree of centralized control over thearchitecture and presentation of Websites, while distributing content owner-ship and site management to each busi-ness unit, franchise or geographic loca-tion. Site Studio also helps companiescreate libraries of Web site components,which are then available to users whenbuilding their own sites. A single piece ofcontent can be pushed out to multiplesites, making site updates easier and con-tent accurate.

In addition, digital asset managementallows organizations to easily manage,share, optimize and re-use corporate digitalassets—such as branding graphics andimages—and publish these assets ontotheir various Web sites. Only authorizedusers have the ability to contribute, updateand access specific content.

Case in point: Genzyme Corp., a glob-al biotechnology company, leverages con-tent management technology to ensure itsmore than 20 unique Web sites are on-brand and encompass Genzyme’s busi-nesses, products and geographies.According to META Group, this initiativeenabled Genzyme to reap a return-on-investment (ROI) of approximately $3.8million by the end of 2004 due to theincreased efficiencies of creating uniformand branded Web sites, improved employ-ee productivity and reduced costs tolaunch new sites.

ECM ConsolidationA number of companies use disparate

products from multiple vendors to meettheir various content management needs,which can result in unnecessarily com-plex implementations, and high integra-tion, support and maintenance costs. Tofully maximize content managementinvestments, customers must implementa solution that provides a standard infra-structure and best practices for all con-tent management applications across itsenterprise.

By consolidating all content-relatedapplications into a single architecture,companies can reduce the cost of separate,disparate content management systems.These solutions enable customers to easilydeploy multiple line-of-business applica-tions and enterprise-wide content manage-ment initiatives.

Partner and Customer ExtranetsMany companies provide large vol-

umes of timely and personalized infor-mation to external partners and cus-tomers. The creation and distribution ofthis content is often a time-intensive and

costly process. By distributing content tothese audiences via a secure extranet,companies eliminate substantial ship-ping, e-mail and printing costs; re-useand publish content from other sources;and provide project and collaboration“workspaces.”

Key content management componentsthat power partner and customer extranetsare Web content management, documentmanagement and collaboration. Thesesolutions allow organizations to easilymanage partner- and customer-related con-tent—including content approvals andautomatic conversion and publication—through an easy-to-use, browser-basedinterface and consistently deliver it to part-ners and customers in a secure, personal-ized fashion through an extranet.

Case in point: Emerson ProcessManagement, a global leader in helpingbusinesses automate production, process-ing and distribution practices, deployed anumber of extranets in just 15 days to pro-vide global suppliers with Web-basedaccess to more than 800 manufacturingprocedures and product drawings. Emersonestimates it saves approximately $20,000per supplier per year by automating manu-al processes.

Marketing Brand Management andDigital Archiving

The amount of images and brand assetscreated and utilized by corporations contin-ues to grow. In order to realize the fullvalue of this content, organizations need tomake images and brand assets availableenterprise-wide via a Web browser; main-tain control over the size and quality ofimages to comply with brand standards;easily and securely share images and brandassets with outside agencies and other e-business applications; and provide Web-based access to training videos.

Digital asset management and video/image management are content managementcomponents which enable organizations toquickly and easily access, manage, share,optimize and re-use corporate digitalassets. For example, the system can auto-matically convert image files from a sin-gle source into a variety of formats andsizes, optimizing images for various typesof consumption, such as PowerPoint pre-sentations and Web sites, while managingall of the renditions as a single object.The technology also automatically con-verts large audio visual interleaved (AVI)files into smaller, lower-resolution MPEGfiles for use on Web sites, and includesthe ability to drill down into particularscenes in a video using storyboards.

Streamlined Financial ProcessesMany organizations use manual finan-

cial processes that lack efficiency andaccuracy. To improve this situation, compa-nies must automate financial processes toincrease capacity, integrate with enterpriseresource planning (ERP) systems, enhanceauditing and controls, expedite exceptionprocessing and enable continuous processchange and improvement.

Capture technology allows organiza-tions to efficiently, cost-effectively turnall paper-based financial documents andreports—such as purchase orders, claimsand invoices—into electronic images,which can be easily stored and retrieved.Business process management (BPM)capabilities connect all enterprise sys-tems in order to efficiently manage anorganization’s entire financial process.This integration enables the automaticrouting and management of transactioninformation, which streamlines worksteps and improves communicationbetween all parties involved in financialprocesses.

Comprehensive tools for documentsearch and retrieval within ERP systemsenable users to easily, intuitively movebetween financial content in ERP sys-tems and content. Additionally, recordsmanagement capabilities streamline theprocesses of creating, declaring, classify-ing, retaining and destroying financialrecords.

SummaryAs the types and volumes of content

continue to increase across organizations,the applications of enterprise content man-agement also are expanding and evolving.Today, six of the most vital uses of ECMinclude compliance and records manage-ment; multi-site Web content management;ECM consolidation; partner and customerextranets; marketing brand managementand digital archiving; and streamlinedfinancials. And, there are many more busi-ness initiatives that technology can suc-cessfully power. Content management cangenerate significant, rapid ROI for cus-tomers and help ensure a low total cost ofownership. ❚

Stellent, Inc. (www.stellent.com) is a global provider of content man-agement software solutions that drive rapid success for customers byenabling fast implementations and generating quick, broad useradoption.With Stellent, customers can easily deploy multiple line-of-business applications—such as Web sites, call centers, dealerextranets, compliance initiatives, accounts payable imaging andclaims processing—and also scale the technology to support enter-prise-wide content management needs.

Stellent has more than 3,500 customers, is headquartered in EdenPrairie, MN, and maintains offices throughout the United States,Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America.

KMWorldSupplement to

ECM is supported by, firstly, a numberof enabling technologies and tools; second-ly, an underlying electronic documentmanagement system that easily integrateswith other enterprise systems; and thirdly,supporting processes that can help life sci-ences organizations achieve incrementaland immediate value from enterpriseinvestments—not just departmental orfunctional benefits. ECM ultimately drivesthe way the entire enterprise can getsmarter by leveraging the information thatis hidden in systems spread across func-tions and around the globe.

Breakthroughs in ECM technologiesenable enterprises to devote their time tobringing products to market rather thanspending it on non-strategic areas such asdata gathering, storage and retrieval. Whilesome companies have taken the first steptoward ECM by incorporating data from allof the business units in one repository, fewhave made the leap to a collaborative strate-gy that encompasses both internal and exter-nal parties or that considers interdepartmen-tal relationships such as how savings in onearea might lead to expenses in another.

However, while an ECM strategy willbenefit companies in the long term, accom-plishing this is neither quick nor easy.Companies must appreciate that ECM is asignificant undertaking and there areimportant lessons to be learned in address-ing content management in the life sci-ences. By taking advantage of the expertiseof life-sciences specialists and of the expe-rience of companies that have implementedECM, companies can draw upon industrybest practices as they press forward withefforts to manage their data, documentsand knowledge.

Discovering the 10 Best PracticesThough the process of ECM implemen-

tation is time-consuming and will vary fromcompany to company, there are several criti-cal steps that an organization should take tofacilitate ECM. The steps divide into 10 bestpractices—gleaned from industry leaders—that demystify the process. In addition,checkpoints should be put in place to ensure

that each step is moving forward. A steering,or strategy, committee should be set up tooversee the program and identify bottle-necks, and it should include high-level repre-sentatives from throughout the organization,say Forrester analysts. 1. Establish the Vision

Start with an enterprise vision to ensurethat the company will be taking a consis-tent approach to the content managementsolution. In establishing the vision, the rep-resentatives must recognize the importanceof acknowledging the organization’s painpoints and its high-priority areas for thebusiness. By developing an enterprise-widegoal that addresses what the enterprise islooking to achieve, the representatives willbe better positioned to set in motion theprocess of sharing information across theindustry silos that have prevailed. 2. Implement a Point Paradigm Approach

With the vision in place, it will be neces-sary to think strategically about aligning theorganization for change. Rather than tryingto solve the enterprise’s content needs in onefell swoop, a company should start with thebiggest pain points in the organization andallow the solution to evolve. At the sametime, however, it is important to ensure thatthe starting points have a broad-enoughscope and that there is high-level buy-in toensure that the organization as a wholeembraces the process.3. Harmonize and Standardize Globally

It is important to build and design solu-tions step-by-step in a way that best fits theorganization’s needs and global reach. Thatwill help the company determine the bestrepository design from an enterprise salesperspective. While harmonizing across theenterprise is the optimum goal, there mightbe instances when differences in vertical divisions will not make such harmonization

Supplement to

ECM Best Practices for theEnlightened Enterprise

Information overload in the life sciences in-dustry is driving a pressing need for bettercontent management. Companies are over-whelmed by content across the business,from clinical trials to regulatory submissions,to manufacturing, to marketing, to sales.

All of this is made even more complexgiven that the vast majority of content isunstructured: 80%-90% percent, accordingto analysts.

Life sciences companies have had tonavigate complex internal and externalpressures that further affect how they gath-er, store and access content. Among the dif-ficulties besetting the industry are disrup-tions from mergers and acquisitions, shrink-ing pipelines, breakthrough technologies inresearch and development and global regu-latory demands.

Despite all this, many life sciences com-panies have shied away from full-scaleenterprise content management, choosinginstead to deploy silos of departmental solu-tions. But today’s pharmaceutical enterpriseneeds to operate without boundaries:between functions, divisions and operationsand across the healthcare value chain.

An organization that adopts a collabo-rative model such as this might be termedthe “enlightened enterprise.”

Finding EnlightenmentAs the name implies, an enlightened

enterprise is one that shares information,knowledge and data across the organizationand with other partners in the chain. It is anorganization that is transparent, extendedand intelligent. The underpinnings of anenlightened enterprise include a clear andactionable enterprise content management(ECM) strategy that reflects an enterprise-wide, solution-deep philosophy.

In the enlightened enterprise, ECMtakes place in a highly collaborative envi-ronment in which everyone benefits from asystematic method of managing, storingand accessing content that reduces totalcost of ownership and increases return oninvestment. It starts with the enterprise’sneed for content management, knowledgemanagement and collaboration.

May 2005S8 KMWorld

Jeffrey Klein, vicepresident, ProductStrategy and BusinessDevelopment for FirstConsulting Group (FCG)Life Sciences, has spentmore than 15 years inproduct strategy,consulting, programmanagement, systemsanalysis and softwaredevelopment in theregulatory and clinical

sides of the pharmaceutical industry, as well as inhealthcare and manufacturing. His area of expertise isenterprise content management strategy and approachfor pharmaceutical companies. Klein has organized,planned and managed global document managementsystems and the associated standards, technology andprocesses. He has built and managed a global deliveryorganization and product development group thatfocuses on bringing leading-edge contentmanagement solutions to market for the life sciencesindustry. Klein can be reached at jklein@fcg.com.

Jeffrey Klein

By Jeffrey Klein, Vice President Product Strategy and Business Development,First Consulting Group Life Sciences

May 2005 S9

possible. In these cases, those vertical depart-ments should be given latitude to define theirspecific requirements. Nevertheless, it makessense to establish a standardized guidingprinciple that can be built upon and tailored toeach vertical team’s requirements. 4. Select Enterprise Architecture Tools

Enterprise architecture refers to the dataelements the enterprise is seeking to manage;how those elements interrelate—includingdata and metadata (or data about data); andhow they support the enterprise’s objectiveswith regard to the way the information ismanaged, stored and accessed. The technolo-gy suite that will support the ECM solutionmust be adaptable to the enterprise’s needsand should meet end-user training needs. Itshould also have a tool-set that is predomi-nant in the industry so it can be used not onlyby those across the organization but also byexternal partners, vendors and customers.The tools an enterprise selects should be con-sistent throughout each phase of implementa-tion and as project updates occur. In addition,companies should have a centralized IT func-tion to support implementation and maintaina common platform. 5. Pick Off-the-Shelf, ConfigurableProducts

A series of off-the-shelf enterprisesuites, referred to by analysts as smartsuites, have emerged in the ECM market-place in recent years, particularly in the life-sciences market. Analysts from researchfirm Gartner Inc. recommend that off-the-shelf suites make it possible to substantiallyreduce integration costs for support ofextended enterprise processes for knowl-edge management, content managementand collaboration. Those making the ITdecisions should take the time to evaluatethe choices available, selecting a packagethat is flexible and configurable to theenterprise as a whole. 6. Avoid Customizations

Past experiences have left companieswary of expensive and inflexible cus-tomized solutions. Not only can implemen-tation, updating and migration to new tech-nologies set a company back tens of mil-lions of dollars, proprietary data formatscan also create enormous difficulties withregard to sharing data across different plat-forms. Over the years, life sciences compa-nies have adopted a mixed bag of informa-tion technology solutions from multiplevendors with proprietary data formats, mak-ing it next-to-impossible for data to beshared across the different platforms.Standardized systems embrace industrybest practices and are designed to meet thegrowing regulatory requirements that weighupon the industry.7. Organize a Shared Service Model

From early on, it is important to bring insupport staff who will manage and maintain

the system after it goes live. Failure to bringsuch key support staff on board early on isoften the reason systems are not embracedafter initial deployment. Setting up a shared-services model helps with corporate buy-inand systems standardization, which in turnwill help propel the success of the solution. 8. Assemble Well-Defined Teams

Deploying a large-scale initiative to man-age a company’s documents and data willhinge on the quality and commitment of thepeople put in place to initiate and carry outthe project. It is therefore vital to clarify rolesand responsibilities and ensure strong, con-tinuous communications throughout the pro-gram. First, the project team is paramount.The deployment teams must understand thegeography, where requirements might differ,and whether there are limitations or benefitsto certain aspects of the project. Beforedeployment, it is important to ensure thatusers are properly trained and that any gapsbetween the project team and end users havebeen bridged. Finally, the support team mustbe well-defined and established beforerolling out the ECM solution. 9. Don’t Overlook Migration andDeployment

Companies often forget about themigration effort until the very end. This isa mistake because in almost every case,deployment turns out to be more complexthan companies anticipated. Failing to planmigration and deployment early enoughwill mean important content may not havebeen transferred to the new ECM system,thereby defeating one of the key purposesof an ECM solution, which is to have

centralized access to all of the knowledge,information and data that exist within theorganization and with partners. Early on,the decision-makers should determinewhich tools should be migrated to the newcontent management system and whichshould be retired. 10. Keep Ownership at the Business Level

ECM should not be seen as an IT initiative.Despite the huge amount of money an enter-prise might invest in an ECM solution, suchprograms often fail when a project is viewedsolely from a technology perspective ratherthan as a business function that is supported bytechnology. With ownership at the businesslevel, it becomes possible to derive the driveand passion needed to ensure the solution isembraced across the business.

It’s All in the PlanningWhile ECM as a concept is becoming

increasingly recognized for the value it canbring to the life sciences industry, disjointeddecision-making and poor implementationhave left many companies disillusioned aboutwhat ECM can do for their organization.Careful planning that begins at the seniorlevel and permeates throughout the organiza-tion as well as adherence to best practices willenable life sciences companies to avoid thepitfalls of systems updates and become truly“enlightened enterprises.” ❚

First Consulting Group is an industry-leading professional servicesfirm focused on helping healthcare providers, health plan insurers,government healthcare, and life sciences companies solve complexbusiness issues.To download the entire Best Practices white paper,visithttp://www.fcg.com/ecmbestpracticeskm or visit www.fcg.com

KMWorldSupplement to

A top-10 pharmaceutical company began ECM implementation by buildingits vision, with a focus on rapid return on investment from an enterprise perspective. The company standardized on an enterprise platform and fromthat developed a two-pronged approach: (1) Process-centric content managementfor the core business needs within the organization, including research anddevelopment data, submission data, manufacturing for standard operatingprocedures and marketing and sales material for advertising and promotion;and (2) a “process-lite” approach, or lightweight document management system, for internal operations such as legal contracts, budgetary informationand human resources policies.

A leading pharmaceutical company began with a solution for submissionsand global manufacturing and quickly found that because the solutions werescalable, they could share information across silos and expand into other arenas without interruption to workflow. In addition, the company has sinceimplemented a content management solution for sales and marketing. Theadoption of interoperable solutions across departments has led to savings ofmore than $1 million a year from cuts to production costs and has improvedregulatory compliance through better access to information.

FCG Best Practices In Action

advantage. Let’s examine these benefits tounderstand the true value of an ECM system.

Considering the evolution and consolida-tion of content technologies that have shapedand refined ECM, its value proposition is—as you might expect—compelling and powerful. ECM solutions combine peoplewith information to make truly end-to-endprocesses possible, delivering improvementsacross the entire business and transparentlymanaging risk while driving performance.

ECM Makes Process PossibleEverything that happens within organiza-

tions today is more or less a business process.Some processes (like hiring and ramping upa new employee) are relatively easy to struc-ture and automate, because each instance ismuch like the previous. Other processes(such as bringing a new product to market)are more difficult to structure because a widearray of contributing factors make eachrelease different. In many organizations, theway in which processes are designed to workis often far removed from the reality of howthey actually function.

Like many project-management chal-lenges, launching a new product involvescomplex groups of interconnected people

working independently toward a commongoal. The preparation phase of the projectinvolves tasks such as pricing, marketing anda kick-off, and demands creativity, commu-nication and coordination. The implementa-tion phase of the project includes tasks suchas promotion, training and the launch itself,and in contrast requires structure, precisionand flawless execution.

The business case for ECM begins withthe fact that the traditionally independenttechnologies that enable these activities, likeprogram management, team support andsales force automation, can now be combinedon a secure, integrated platform. This unifica-tion enables key processes—like a productrelease—to be managed from beginning toend. Promotion, for example, which can spanboth the preparation and implementationphases of the product launch, can be closelymanaged in relation to other activities.

When a last-minute change in channelstrategy is required, the planned promotionalactivities must also be changed. The dissem-ination of the right information to the rightpeople at the right time is an inherent part ofthe change-management process. The abilityto tightly manage and execute processestranslates directly into shorter cycle times andreduced costs. After all, if you can avoid aprint run of user manuals because a last-minute change wasn’t identified and sent tothe translation agency, you can see immedi-ate and significant savings.

ECM Improves the Entire BusinessWhat differentiates ECM from the con-

tent technologies that it eclipses is its wide-spread relevancy. A robust service-orientedarchitecture—in simplest terms, a two-tiermodel of foundation and application services—ensures that organizations candeploy a targeted solution now, and easilyextend it to an enterprise-wide deploymentlater. In other words, ECM not only makes

Supplement to

ECM: Making ProcessPossible

Over the past few years, enterprise contentmanagement (ECM) has emerged as adefined enterprise software category, one thatis clearly capturing more and more attentionin executive suites. The fact that KMWorld ispublishing this white paper about ECM bestpractices for the fifth year in a row is evi-dence that ECM is well established. AsCEO of Open Text, I recently published the definitive book, “Enterprise ContentManagement: What You Need to Know,” tohelp business leaders understand the scopeand context of ECM and why it is impor-tant to the success of their businesses:www.opentext.com/kmworld/ecm-book.We’re all familiar with the history of marketconsolidation and the demand for more tight-ly integrated enterprise applications. Thenew focus on corporate governance and astricter regulatory environment has made usaware of the need to define, secure and controlthe process by which information is created,managed and retained within our systems.

However, ECM is much more than a col-lection of tactical solutions to solve today’strendy business problems. It is a strategicapproach, a powerful intersection of funda-mental business benefits that helps organiza-tions turn their content into competitive

May 2005S10 KMWorld

Tom Jenkins is theChairman and ChiefExecutive Officer ofOpen Text, a marketleader in providingenterprise contentmanagement solutionsthat bring togetherpeople, processes andinformation in globalorganizations. Jenkinshas served in a varietyof technical andmanagerial positions at

computer hardware and software technology intensivegrowth companies during his career including designengineer, sales manager, general manager, chiefoperating officer, president, CEO and chairman. Jenkinsis the author of “Enterprise Content Management,WhatYou Need To Know,” published in October, 2004.

Tom Jenkins

CEOBy Tom Jenkins, Chairman and CEO, Open Text

ECM enables key processes such as launching a new product to be managed end-to-end.

process possible, but it makes it possiblefor every part of the organization.

A comprehensive ECM system comprisesfoundation services upon which specificapplication services are built. The foundationservices are relevant to a wide range of busi-ness problems and include enterprise search,records management and archiving.Application services, alternatively, target avery specific business need, such as accountspayable processing, customer service opti-mization or employee accreditations. Thistwo-tiered structure allows ECM to be ashared platform on the one hand and delivertargeted, customized solutions on the other.By combining the necessary application serv-ices and delivering a solution with a targeted,consistent interface, businesses can easilydeploy multiple, even divergent solutions ontop of a single, shared platform.

Consider the finance and marketingdepartments within an organization. Althoughtasks are very different, they share certain fun-damental requirements. Both departments:◆ Create and consume tremendous amounts

of information;◆ Require significant coordination between

individuals; and◆ Exercise tight control over the materials

they produce.The foundation services provide a com-

mon set of functionality to address theseshared needs, such as storage management,records management and document man-agement.

But when it comes to addressing depart-ment-specific needs, the requirements divergesharply. The accounts-payable functionrequires integration with ERP systems,invoice scanning capabilities and workflowfor exceptions handling. The field-sales sup-port function in the marketing departmentrequires shared workspaces, offline synchro-nization and discussion groups.

Because every ECM solution is builtupon the same robust foundation services,companies may begin by deploying a spe-cific application today—such as accountspayable processing or field sales support—to meet an immediate business need. Later,

they can leverage their investment in theunderlying foundation services to deployadditional targeted applications and ulti-mately to deploy ECM enterprise-wide.

ECM Manages Risk While DrivingPerformance

The two-tier structure of ECM solutionsprovides a unique and extremely signifi-cant business benefit. Because ECM solu-tions are built on this robust foundation ofshared services, compliance capabilitiescan be transparently embedded into busi-ness processes. When compliance becomesan integrated, indistinguishable part ofdaily operations, organizations can managerisk while driving performance. The goal ofevery business, after all, is not to be com-pliant, but to be successful.

Consider e-mail. Recent court rulingsand emerging regulations demand that e-mail content be managed and retained likeother corporate records. But rather thanimposing changes in system behavior uponusers, an ECM system can transparentlyinsert compliance capabilities into the stan-dard e-mail service. E-mail content isarchived and managed as required, whileusers continue to work as they always have.

ECM accelerates the natural progressionof IT from routine processes to the real worldof complex, often chaotic, business opera-tions. Without ECM, processes such as prod-uct launches and e-mail management requirespecialized point solutions that duplicate a

host of similar services, in a fragmented andcostly system environment.

By measuring the improvements in busi-ness processes, organizations can identify thedirect benefits introduced by an ECM solu-tion. Providing better access to informationenables customer support calls to be resolvedimmediately, eliminating the need for costlycall-backs. Interconnecting project activitiesto streamline go-to-market activities acceler-ates product releases. Offloading e-mail con-tent to cost-effective storage hardware enablesorganizations to reduce e-mail server invest-ments, without sacrificing user productivity.

We believe that the next great idea, thenext breakthrough, the next innovationresides with the collected knowledge ofconnected people. That’s why we establishedthe Open Text ECM Leadership Forum:www.opentext.com/kmworld/ecm-events.This ongoing series of events across NorthAmerica gives you the opportunity to meetwith our sponsors, customers and our ownECM experts, to receive your copy of“Enterprise Content Management: WhatYou Need to Know,” and learn how you canbegin turning your content into competitiveadvantage today. ❚

Open Text™ is a market leader providing enterprise content manage-ment (ECM) solutions that bring together people, processes andinformation in global organizations. Today, the company supportsmore than 20 million seats across 13,000 deployments in 114 coun-tries and 12 languages worldwide.Open Text is one of KMWorld’s “100Companies that Matter in KM, 2005.” To order your copy of "Enterprise Content Management: What you need to know":www.opentext.com/kmworld/ecm-book.

May 2005 S11KMWorldSupplement to

BT, a UK communications solutions provider, turned to Open Text to develop an integrated communications network for every stage of product development, from discovery to post-launch evaluation. BT’s ECM solution enabled the organization to capture, store and reuse its intellectual assets, and establish virtual communities for collaboration. The enhanced levels of communication throughout the organizationensured a clearly communicated company position, improved employee productivityand satisfaction, and enhanced corporate governance through increased process visibility.

Siemens AG, headquartered in Munich, Germany, with more than 400,000 employees and a presence in more than 190 countries, has one of the most geographically complex and comprehensive ECM deployments in the world. Deployedin a single department more than a decade ago, their ECM solution from Open Textnow extends to partners and customers while providing streamlined processes, collaborative workspaces and shared content to eight unique business areas, includingpower, transportation, medical, lighting, finance and real estate and more.

Genzyme Corporation, to ensure the careful management of FDA submissionsinformation, relies on Open Text ECM solutions to help project teams work together,manage and share information, and provide processes and controls to ensurecareful management of that information. Robust document management capabilitiessupport the company’s compliance with the FDA’s mandate for electronic recordsrequirements, and has quickly become a fundamental part of the way thatGenzyme does business.

Real World Case Examples

ECM makes process possible for multiple,even divergent,parts ofthe organization.

To truly deliver a return on the significantinvestment necessary to build an effectiveECM system, you need to first develop anunderstanding of the information workflowwithin your organization, including teamstructures, knowledge sharing, analyticaltechniques and fiscal compliance deliver-ables. Far more than merely manipulatingand storing data, content management isabout the bottom line. And you will positive-ly impact the bottom line once you’vegrasped the concept of the interconnectednature of your ECM system within andaround your organization’s workflow.

A Five-Step ApproachTo develop such a holistic view and to

create a successful roadmap for managing,organizing, integrating and delivering con-tent, this five-step approach can help:

1. Establish a cross-functional imple-mentation team, with one clear leader, todevelop a broad, representative ECM strate-gy. Regardless of which cost center owns

ECM deployment, team members shouldinclude representatives from all businessunits/departments, including IT, the informa-tion center/corporate library, an executivesponsor and, if possible, an outside advisorto provide perspective and mediation. Themultifunctional nature of this team ensures avaried approach to knowledge managementthat targets the needs of broad user groupsand avoids the often lopsided, one-size-fits-all solutions that really don’t fit anyone.

2. Survey your end users prior to, dur-ing and after investigation and implementa-tion of the ECM system. It is critical to sur-vey at multiple points to establish bench-marks and build an ROI story. Treat internalcustomers just like you would external cus-tomers—their satisfaction with the final“product” is the true measure of your suc-cess; their adoption of the ECM system ulti-mately impacts the bottom line productivityand profitability of your organization.

3. Clearly identify all aspects of theoverall ECM system so that each basic ele-ment is adequately incorporated into thefinal release—even if it is not delivered in asingle stage. Include applications and sys-tems, such as e-mail, shared directories,existing portals, etc. Keep in mind this is theideal. Unfortunately, many ECM systemsare developed piecemeal, which leads to dis-jointed implementations and poor overallperformance. Although developing a strate-gy at the mid-point instead of the beginningis a big challenge, it isn’t too late. At what-ever point you find yourself, define the blue-print of the entire system before trying tobuild any one piece of it.

Your ECM blueprint should also includethe known “pain points” connected witheach piece of the system, so that these issuescan be adequately addressed before release.Conduct discovery during the initial phasesof strategy development to identify:

◆ Sources of content (both internal and external);

Supplement to

Maximize User Satisfaction:Five Steps to ECM Success

Implementing an enterprise content man-agement (ECM) system to capture the ever-increasing number of documents producedby your organization can be a daunting task.We have all experienced, or heard from col-leagues, the horror stories of limited end-user acceptance, poor search results, miss-ing data, irrelevant archives and widespreadconfusion surrounding internal contentrepositories. The good news is that we canlearn from these past experiences.

The time is ripe for companies to take astep back and look at their ECM strategyfrom a more holistic view. The ultimate goalfor any ECM system is to increase efficiencyand productivity through end-user satisfac-tion. Too often this objective is obscured by afocus on aggressive release dates or “bleed-ing edge” technology. The technical featuresof an effective system and the speed at whichyou deliver that system to end users are bothfactors in determining the success or failureof an ECM release. However, these require-ments are merely a means to an end—specif-ically, end-user adoption and endorsement.

May 2005S12 KMWorld

Ethan Eisner works inthe Corporate &Federal Marketsbusiness of LexisNexis.He is responsible forleading the marketdevelopment andmarketing strategyteams for theEnterprise & Librarydivision. Eisner hasmore than 15 years ofexperience in

marketing and consulting with organizations such asWorknowledge,The Franklin Mint and Bain &Company. Ethan holds an MBA from the WhartonSchool of the University of Pennsylvania and a BS inQuantitative Analysis from The Pennsylvania StateUniversity.

He can be reached at ethan.eisner@lexisnexis.com.

Ethan EisnerBy Ethan Eisner, VP of Marketing and Strategy for Corporate & Federal Markets, LexisNexis

May 2005 S13

◆ Processes for content integration and linking;◆ Interface and display options;◆ Search and retrieval capabilities;◆ Advanced analytics; and◆ End-user acceptance.

Discovery Questions—Existing Solutions,Platforms and Systems◆ What types of content (both format

and focus) do you create/store? Howmuch data do you have in your person-al/team archive? How much new datais created each month/week?

◆ How do you/does your team currentlymanage these documents? Do you storethem in a shared directory or database?

◆ Who uses/reuses these internal doc-uments? Who should be using them?

◆ Do you have a document retrieval process?◆ Do you have a team portal or intranet site?

Discovery Questions—Potential PainPoints◆ Do you have duplication of effort in

document storage?◆ Do you have masses of unorganized

text documents (i.e., reports, training,presentations, press releases) that youwant to store and reuse as a team?

◆ Would it save you money/time if youcould retrieve past information? That is,would access to archived informationallow you to get your product to marketfaster, save hours per employee in relationto normal workflow or decrease ramp upand training time for newer employees?

◆ Do you need to quickly retrieve docu-mentation to answer inquiries, such asfor government compliance? Does thismonopolize your department’s timewithout adding value?

If you answer these questions in theearly stages, it will help direct vendorselection and development efforts.

4. Develop quantifiable ROI measure-ments and benchmark those metrics priorto system development and roll-out. ECMimplementation involves a variety of soft-ware applications, crosses different businessunits/departments and requires very largeorganization-wide investment, often reach-ing into the millions of dollars. Despite thissignificant investment in time, resources andfunding, many organizations do not developmetrics for determining end-user adoption,usage and preference—measures whichwould clearly demonstrate the success orfailure of the system, as well as identify areasfor improvement. Beyond anecdotal evi-dence, metrics should include:◆ Search and response times;◆ Database access statistics;◆ Spend amounts on content creation ver-

sus content management; and ◆ Overall user satisfaction.

Also, when calculating against an invest-ment, don’t forget to include support costs

such as maintenance contracts, additionalsoftware updates and other hidden internalIT costs (network and hardware) beyondthose associated with the initial ECM soft-ware and implementation costs.

5. Identify and evaluate “ECM secretweapons”—third-party content and analyticsproducts that will increase the value of yourECM system, thus driving up ROI. Relevantexternal content and robust analyses provideactionable information that complementinternal data, creating a richer knowledgeenvironment for end users. Again, whenadopting a holistic ECM strategy, it is best toconsider these features before roll-out.However, they can also serve to rejuvenate anexisting underutilized ECM system. Often,these added features provide the hook toengage end users and create preference for—even dependence on—the ECM system.

The ECM secret weapons include:◆ Current awareness content customized to fit

the needs of specific departments/teams andend users. Delivers updates directly to theECM system, resulting in a truly integrated,content-rich experience for the end user.

◆ Integrated analytics incorporating infor-mation from both internal and externaldata to offer not just facts but true answersto end users. Facilitates the process ofturning data into actionable knowledge.

◆ Metadata and structure applied automati-cally to categorize and filter content. Meta-data created via a controlled vocabulary andmanaged within a taxonomy produces the

structure upon which to build advanced func-tionality, such as alerts, directories and links.

◆ Advanced search and retrieval, built on richdocument metadata, ensures access to themost relevant content. Effective retrievaleliminates duplication of effort while pro-moting information discovery and extrac-tion across departments/teams.

Ultimately, by using this five-stepapproach, your holistic ECM strategy willencompass all aspects of the content andinformation workflow of your organization.Rather than paralyzing your end users withinformation overload, your system will liber-ate them through comprehensive, effectiveand immediate access to pertinent, up-to-date and actionable knowledge. ❚

The author would like to thank the following contributors to this arti-cle, including Jennifer Aleknavage, David Hanson, Jon Klein, TeresaMacGregor and Pam Tippett.

As a world-leading provider of enhanced information services andmanagement tools,LexisNexis® delivers access to comprehensive andauthoritative business,news, legal,government and tax information in100 countries worldwide. It unites proprietary brands,Web technolo-gies and premium information to offer an extensive range of solutionsthat address job-specific and organization-wide information needs,driving productivity and confident decision making.

To learn more about how LexisNexis is helping companies organize,manage, integrate and deliver content into various platforms, go towww.lexisnexis.com/integrationsolutions/. For more informationabout LexisNexis SmartIndexing Technology™,go to http://www.lex-isnexis.com/taxonomy or contact the LexisNexis SmartIndexingTechnology team directly at Smart.Indexing@lexisnexis.com.

KMWorldSupplement to

Organizing DataBackground/Challenge: A media company needs to streamline its indexing

process. The library division realizes that its manual indexing process is drainingresources and creating a lag time of content delivery to aggregators.

LexisNexis® Solution/Benefit: With the LexisNexis SmartIndexing Technology™and taxonomy solution, the library now automates its indexing process to free up thelibrary staff’s time to focus on other critical projects and reduces the time it takes todeliver content to aggregators.

Knowledge SharingBackground/Challenge: A purchasing department of a global consumer

packaged-goods company needs to improve the effectiveness of its intranet siteand knowledge management process. The current system is affecting productiv-ity because materials are not always archived and employees cannot find the rightinformation quickly. And a lot of information about vendors is not being sharedacross the different purchasing groups.

LexisNexis Solution/Benefit: With the LexisNexis SmartIndexing Technology™the purchasing team improves its knowledge sharing. Enhanced document linkageand indexing within its portals allows it to consolidate spending pools. Now, theteam saves money by taking advantage of bulk discounts with vendors. Also, theamount of time spent searching for information is reduced dramatically. TheLexisNexis® Publisher tool allows a company to customize and display current newstopics for different end users via different platforms, including its Web site, intranet,portal and even BlackBerry Wireless Handhelds™. Now, the right information isdelivered to the right people at the right time.

Example Solutions

challenges to finding the right solution foryour organization can be daunting.

Cost of Manual PDF ConversionAverage knowledge worker salary =

$80,000

◆ 1/3 of productive time is spent recreatingdocuments and information (Coopers &Lybrand);

◆ 5% of that time is tied to PDF productiv-ity issues (ScanSoft estimate);

◆Yields a PDF inefficiency cost of approx-imately $1,300 per year, per employee; and

◆ If PDF files could be automatically con-verted into Microsoft Word—completewith text, columns, tables and graphics—a500-person organization could recover asmuch as $650K annually in lost labor.

Nearly all business documents are createdand edited using Microsoft Word because itaugments powerful authoring capabilitieswith efficient revision tools. With MicrosoftOffice, teams of people can easily participatein the creation of documents because changesand comments are tracked automatically.

However, the recipient not only has theability to change the document, they can alsosee hidden information within the source fileitself. For example, the Track Changes featurein Microsoft Word retains the draft’s or drafts’text and data in the Word document, provid-ing others with a way to learn perhaps morethan the author really intended to share.

Sharing documents as PDF overcomesthis issue because the conversion of Word

and PowerPoint files into PDF “flattens” thedocument, stripping it of hidden and poten-tially sensitive information in the process.This is just one of the reasons that PDF hasbecome a popular way to share and storebusiness documents.

Sharing electronic documents as PDF provides professional offices with other significant benefits. PDF documents are compact and easy to e-mail, can be universallyviewed on the Web and print just as if theycame from the original application. PDF fileshave compressed file sizes, password security,128-bit encryption, and support watermarks,bookmarks, hyperlinks and more. PDF filesalso allow others to view and print a documentwithout the need for the original authoring application. This is especially valuable forsharing documents from highly specialized ap-plications, such as photo editing, layout, CAD,drawing, accounting and contact management.

The portable document format (PDF) hasindeed become the digital equivalent of phys-ical paper. With over 500 million downloadsof Adobe Reader, and more than 1,200 vendors delivering solutions based on the industry standard, PDF is certainly pervasive.

PDF does things that you can’t do easily—or at all—with the Microsoft Word(.doc) and other source formats.

◆ PDF files can be smaller than the originalfile. Converting PowerPoint and otherformats into PDF often enables the sharing of documents that otherwisewould be too big for e-mail servers thathave size limits on attachments.

◆ PDF is less susceptible to viruses thanother formats. Word and other applica-tions can carry harmful viruses that arenot as easily attached to a PDF file.

◆ PDF “flattens” a document. Converting toPDF removes hidden information containedin the source format, adding an importantlevel of security to sensitive documents.

Supplement to

Better PDF for Business

The single greatest challenge to streamlin-ing document-based processes in businessis the fact that there are two incompatibledominant electronic document formats—Microsoft® Word and the Adobe portabledocument format, or PDF. Both of these formats are pervasive because they each deliver value within different phases of the document lifecycle—Microsoft Word is asuperior tool for creating and sharing documents, while PDF has distinct advantagesfor the sharing and storing of documents.

Microsoft Office provides millions of corporate, government and academic professionals a rich environment for documentcreation and collaborative authoring. Un-fortunately the editable Microsoft Word fileformat is not well suited for electronic pub-lishing and online document storage.

On the other hand, PDF has expandedfrom its traditional roots as a design and pre-press tool to an electronic file sharing standard providing business users with aformat that is well suited for the distribution,viewing and archiving of documents.

Nearly every professional office environ-ment uses Microsoft Word and PDF at different points during the lifecycle of a busi-ness document. The incompatibilities of thesetwo dominant formats create inefficiencies.

The pervasiveness of Microsoft Word(400 million) and Adobe Acrobat Reader(500 million) gives rise to the need for doc-ument management solutions that enablethe seamless movement of documents between the two dominant formats. Thismay sound simple enough, but the many

May 2005S14 KMWorld

Robert Weidemanleads the globalmarketing, productmarketing and productstrategy teams forScanSoft’s ProductivityApplications division.From 1999 until 2001Weideman was vicepresident of marketingfor the Adobe Systems’portfolio companyCardiff Software,

playing an instrumental role in the invention ofLiquidOffice™ and establishing the W3C XForms XMLstandard. From 1991 to 1999,Weideman was vicepresident of marketing for TGS.com, helping toestablish the Internet 3D standard VRML, and todeliver the world’s first 3D browser,WebSpace™Navigator.Weideman holds a B.S. in BusinessAdministration, Computer Information Systems fromSan Diego State University.

Robert Weideman

By Robert Weideman, Senior Vice President, Marketing and Product Strategy, ScanSoft

“Nearly every office uses Microsoft Word

and PDF at different points. But the

incompatibilities of these two dominant

formats create inefficiencies.”

May 2005 S15

◆ PDF is not an editing format. PDF enablesbusiness documents and forms to beshared in a way that prohibits changes tothe original.

◆ PDF documents look the same online asprinted. Web pages will print differently frombrowser to browser and system to system.

◆ PDF documents can be secured more eas-ily than other formats. The ubiquitousAdobe Reader and growing number ofthird-party PDF products enable the useof secure PDF documents.

◆ PDF allows others to view documentswithout needing the authoring application.While Word, Excel and PowerPoint areubiquitous, drawing, CAD, accounting andother specialized applications are not.Sharing as PDF removes the dependencyof the recipient to have, and know how touse, specialized applications.

What Business Wants in PDFScanSoft conducted a survey of business

professionals, and found that 44% felt that being able to create PDF files from MicrosoftOffice was “extremely important,” with an additional 28% saying that it was “important.”In the same survey, 33% felt that creating PDFfiles from other PC applications was ex-tremely important, with an additional 34%stating that it was important. If more than 60%of business professionals surveyed have astrong need for creating PDF, why are fewerthan 10% of business desktops empoweredwith the ability to create PDF files? In the survey, ScanSoft discovered that businessusers wanted a solution that has the price, fea-tures and performance designed specificallyfor office professionals. Existing solutions, in-cluding Adobe Acrobat Standard ($299) andAdobe Acrobat Professional ($449), had robust features needed by design professionals,and lacked features needed by business, suchas converting PDF into fully formatted Microsoft Word documents.

Fortunately, the file format for PDF is anopen standard, meaning that companies thatwant to develop PDF solutions independentof Adobe can do so. This has led to an ever-increasing number of PDF products; manydesigned specifically for professional officeenvironments and priced to enable PDF onevery business desktop.

Turn Your Paper into GoldUsing paper is a real drag—one that

reduces personal productivity, increases operating costs and inhibits an organization’sability to excel. This, of course, is not news.Industry experts have told us for more than 10years that billions of dollars are spent each yearmanually routing, storing and managing paper-based processes. Over those same 10years we have seen a growing number of

organizations leverage dedicated productiondocument capture systems to process contacts,loan applications and invoices. But what canbe done about the larger problem? What canbe done to automate the tons of paper used byevery office worker, in every office, every day?

Until recently, significant technology barriers have made it impractical for organi-zations to put paper document routing at thefingertips of every office worker. The need toacquire and connect scanning devices to eachworker desktop was costly, limiting access todesktop scanning to specific departments orjob functions. Some organizations tried to apply comprehensive distributed productioncapture products to address the problem, butquickly found that the cost of training everyoffice worker in complex “batch classifica-tion” and “metadata” constructs made theproposed solution unworkable.

In the mid 1990s, advances in networkinfrastructure (the Internet), desktop clients(browsers) and application connectivity(TCP/IP) combined to make digital document sharing a universal productivitytool—via e-mail, the Web and more. A par-allel can be drawn today in technologies andproducts that have come together to finallyallow every organization to “turn paper intogold.” These include advances in:

1. Network infrastructure◆ Universal scanning via network multi-

function devices

◆ One-button “Scan-to-Desktop”

2. Desktop clients◆ Easy-to-use office productivity applications,

integrated with Microsoft Office◆ Paper and PDF document conversion

solutions—for document repurposing,OCR indexing or archiving

◆ PDF-based document annotation and assembly tools

3. Application Connectivity◆ Drag & drop document routing—to

people, applications and devices◆ XML data sharing◆ Affordable document management

Digital copiers and networked multifunc-tion devices—yes the ones you already own—deliver the power of document capture toevery worker. Easy to use and affordabledesktop applications, such as ScanSoft PaperPort and OmniPage, add the desktop capabilities needed to make scanning easyand productive, while Microsoft Office andPDF provide the formats needed for collabo-ration, publishing and archiving. The paperlessoffice has arrived. ❚

ScanSoft Inc. is a publicly traded company (Nasdaq:SSFT) with officesaround the world. With nearly 1,100 employees, ScanSoft is the market-leading supplier of speech and imaging solutions that areused to automate a wide range of manual processes—increasingproductivity, reducing costs and improving customer service.

KMWorldSupplement to

Challenge #1Address the historical incompatibility between the two leading electronic

document standards, Microsoft Word and PDF, which causes unnecessaryand costly manual re-keying of information and slows down the documentcreation process.

ScanSoft solution #1PDF Converter, a utility created through a collaboration between

ScanSoft and Microsoft that instantly converts existing PDF files into fullyformatted Microsoft Word documents, forms and Excel spreadsheets.

Challenge #2Deliver the ability to create PDF files to every business desktop—affordably.

ScanSoft solution #2ScanSoft PDF Create! is the fast and reliable PDF way to enable PDF

creation from any PC application, with the price, features and performancethat allow it to put the power of PDF on every business desktop.

Challenge #3Replace manual paper processes with electronic documents—but without

the expense and complexity usually associated with paperless systems.

ScanSoft solution #3ScanSoft PDF Converter Professional is a complete solution for creating,

converting and editing PDF documents. It enables form filling, documentassembly and annotation—as well as digital signatures.

ScanSoft Solutions

and so on. E-mail management, forinstance, can be especially intimidatingbecause it is often positioned as operatingunder different guidelines than other infor-mation that companies archive, particularlyin terms of significant and expensive stor-age requirements.

This perception leads to another point:why, for instance, do so many vendors’ e-mail solutions focus on mass storage of e-mails if this type of narrow approach haslong been viewed as inappropriate for otherkinds of archived data that companies needready access to? For any type of data, a“just store everything” approach can givethe impression of being well-positioned forinformation retrieval in case of audits, forexample, but it deflects attention from crit-ical concerns about efficient, timely andaccurate retrieval of specific, relevantinformation.

Moreover, “just storing everything”increases the chance that information repos-itories become liability vaults: in otherwords, information is retained that doesn’t,by law, need to be kept, which increases risk,and overall competitiveness diminishes interms of search accuracy, retrieval efficiencyand cost-effectiveness. In addition, becausecompliance regulations view all companyinformation equally, it’s counterintuitive toprocess one type of data differently fromothers. Compilation and retrieval of informa-tion slows down and assurances of accuracyare compromised.

Because some organizations become sointimidated by what they see as overly com-plicated content management factors and animposing breadth of accountability, theymay view the need for a CMS as a catalyst toreorganize their entire IT infrastructure. Thisattitude assumes that the full range of con-tent management needs is readily apparentand that resources are in place to tackle it in

one go. ZyLAB argues that a scalable, incre-mental approach is preferable in nearly allinstances because it anticipates the “organic”adjustments organizations must routinelymake as their needs fluctuate. Organizationsand compliance regulations are so dynamicthat change must be accounted for, and anyselected CMS must have the adaptability tominimize the cost implications of thosechanges. Scalable approaches are also betterpositioned to handle one type of content thatmany complex CMS systems cannot: paper.

Simplicity as a Driver for Scaleable CMSThis viewpoint is not an advocacy of

dumbing down CMS functionality or, worse,converting everything to paper—far from it.Multifaceted organizations operate in com-plex ways, requiring solutions that support avariety of processes, essential activities andassociated data. If the evaluation criteria forthe most complex components in CMS areviewed differently than other content man-agement components, the level of complexi-ty required by most organizations, particular-ly small- and medium-sized businesses, isoverstated, and the importance of favoringsimplicity as a reference point is underesti-mated. At the core of any simple and effec-tive solution lies its ability to address thestraightforward, yet challenging, issue thatstill affects many organizations: how to effi-ciently archive, search, organize and retrieveinformation from thousands of pages ofpaper. The fact remains: the paperless officestill does not exist and will not.

Corporate governance regulations con-sider (paper) records management veryimportant. Users can be trained to makeproper compliance-based decisions aboutkeeping and destroying paper, and the logicdriving these decisions is generally consistentwith long-held approaches to handling paper.Users can save relevant documents within setretention periods, and they can decide if they

Supplement to

Easy to Deploy, Use and Maintain...

Affordability in ContentManagement andCompliance

The impetus on organizations to be trans-parent and fiscally prudent continues to in-tensify, motivated by the constant drive formore competitive efficiency and the needfor compliance with corporate governanceinitiatives. Therefore, most organizationshave moved to implement some type of con-tent management system (CMS) to handletheir data, such as RMA, DMS, Web-con-tent management or a combined solution.

Because the types and volume of infor-mation continue to expand, CMS complexityand sophistication have grown in parallel. As a result, organizations can become over-whelmed when evaluating solutions toaddress their specific content managementneeds, particularly considering the hundredsof vendors offering a wide variety of contentmanagement tools. To compensate, potentialusers often end up evaluating CMS qualitybased upon its capacity to handle what is per-ceived as the most complex and/or “hot” itemin their suite of information materials—suchas massive e-mail collections, Web content ordigital rights management—rather thanaddressing the straightforward core capabili-ties the organization typically requires.Content management is a modular process,which should be developed to support newmedia in the same functional way that has formany years been used to handle paper files.

Complex Content ManagementDebunked

Focusing on complex data types canlead organizations to assume they mustoverspend on large, overly complex sys-tems to handle all information processingactivities. Organizations can feel likethere’s no choice but to endure the signifi-cant associated costs: long implementationand training times, huge IT infrastructurecosts, significant maintenance requirements

May 2005S16 KMWorld

Dr. Johannes C. Scholtesis the president andCEO of ZyLAB NorthAmerica LLC and is incharge of ZyLAB’sglobal operations.Since Dr. Scholtes tookover the leadership ofZyLAB in 2002, ZyLABhas enjoyed double-digit expansion as wellas consistent annualgrowth in profitability.

Before joining ZyLAB in 1989, Dr. Scholtes was anofficer in the Intelligence Department of the RoyalDutch Navy. Dr. Scholtes holds a M.S. degree inComputer Science from Delft University of Technology(NL) and a Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from theUniversity of Amsterdam (NL).

Johannes C. Scholtes

Johannes Scholtes, President & CEO, ZyLAB North America

May 2005 S17

want to store printed documents in a CMS.But certain “high-end” CMSs do not providethis expected level of control and flexibilityfor all of the content types they manage.

Overcoming Intimidation:Electronic Media and E-mail

The primary concerns that drive a CMS’ssuitability should be the same that organiza-tions have used to manage paper: efficient,secure storage of archived data, fast and accu-rate searching and retrieval of targeted infor-mation, use of open-technology for long-termstability and flexibility, and scalable and inte-gratable construction for easy deploymentand usage. If the expectations for managingpaper are used as the primary criteria forjudging how all data (including e-mails andWeb content) should be managed and uti-lized, organizations can simplify their contentmanagement expectations and not lose sightof the larger content management context. Inother words, “complex” data like e-maildoesn’t have to be treated as a wholly sepa-rate item needing a management approachdifferent than that typically used for othertypes of information.

How and why any information needs to bestored and used in the first place is primary toevaluating a CMS. All forms of retained data,whether they are paper-based documents, e-mails and attachments, presentations, videoconferences and so on, are all parts of the larg-er, integrated content management arena andneed to be addressed as such. The role ofpaper cannot be underestimated; in manyorganizations, the burden of paper is still theirkey content management challenge. Data isretained for a reason—to have the retrieval ofinformation readily available—so it should besupported by a CMS that makes all informa-tion accessible and searchable at the sametime, in the same way, in a secure environ-ment, and at an affordable price.

Organizations can perform all of theircontent management tasks effectively with-out having to purchase monolithic, feature-heavy solutions that can adversely affectoverall affordability and usability. Scaleable,flexible and open solutions, which enableorganizations to handle paper, electronic filesand e-mail at whatever level of complexitythey actually need, are readily available.

The bottom line: long-established criteriafor managing paper is also relevant for man-aging other types of information. Paper is stilla primary factor for many organizations, and

for these organizations, the manner in whichthey handle paper should provide the founda-tion from which all other CMS capabilitiesrefer. By taking care of the paper records andthen gradually moving to more complexmedia types, an affordable and controllableimplementation process can be realized.Using such basic functionality as the definingcriteria for evaluating suitable CMSs enablesorganizations to not only focus on what theirusers really need but also enables them toview the scale in which they need it. Doingmore with less is always better than default-ing to the biggest and most complex solutionjust because there doesn’t seem to be anyother choice. ❚

ZyLAB is an innovative developer of affordable content managementand compliance solutions for paper-intensive organizations.ZyIMAGE,ZyLAB’s flagship solution, helps small and medium-sized businesses(SMBs) and government organizations digitally file and manage mil-lions of pages of paper, electronic documents, and e-mail.High-quali-ty search and retrieval features (which support over 200 languages)give users the ability to easily organize, investigate, and distributeinformation.

With more than 7,000 installations worldwide and more than300,000 users, ZyLAB has a wide breadth of experience and knowl-edge across a variety of different industries and business applications.For more information visit: www.zylab.com.

KMWorldSupplement to

For over 20 years, ZyLAB has worked alongside organiza-tions with immense data repositories to develop the bestarchiving, searching and retrieval solutions. This experiencehas shown that, although attention to specific types of contentmanagement issues may ebb and flow, core concerns remainconstant and need to be addressed:

◆ Just because e-mail is, according to a recent IDC report, the“elephant in the corner,” doesn’t mean its management shouldbe intimidating or viewed as exceptional within a larger content management context. In fact, efficient and targeted(project-based) storage solutions—focused on exporting PSTfiles into an open, XML-based ZyIMAGE Webserver, for instance, rather than on wholesale dumping of Exchangeservers in large database repositories—enable users to efficiently conduct a breadth of integrated searching andrecords management activities within their entire content management infrastructure. Security and back-up activitiesare not compromised.

◆ The paperless office does not exist nor will it any time soon. Thefact that paper still exists in mass quantities demonstrates that organizations still realize the multiple benefits offered by paperdocuments. ZyLAB has long specialized in retaining all the benefits of paper while relieving the burden of paper (storage,transportation, accessibility, and so on), as well as also allowing digitized paper to be searched at the same time as other archiveddata types, such as e-mail.

◆ Good CMSs require open technology and open formats, suchas XML and TIFF. Regardless of documents’ original file types,

information contained within them must be secure and available for their entire lifecycle. Organizations need assurancethat their information is always accessible without having toworry about upgrading or continually revamping their systems.

◆ Expectations for efficiency and cost-effectiveness are as highas they are for system performance. Efficiency-focused organizations demand software that is easy to use, install, deploy, support and maintain. Users no longer toleratespending weeks in training courses; solution deploymentshould take days, not weeks or months.

◆ Meeting compliance requirements is a cost factor, so CMSsmust be flexible and integratable, supported by fast and usable searching, retrieving and organizing capabilities. Being able to leverage the wealth of records information makesorganizations more competitive and cost effective, particularlyin terms of secondary costs like legal fees and staffing.

◆ A key to effective and affordable solutions is being able tobuy only what you need. Vendors need to do a better job of respecting organizational understanding of content management wants and needs, and how to address thoseneeds, particularly in terms of scale (i.e. lower upfront costs,quicker deployment and ROI and better positioning for incremental future growth, if necessary).

◆ Integration with existing systems is preferable to comprehensiveoverhauls. Replacing significant parts of existing systems is costlyand time-consuming. New CMS components should alsoquickly and seamlessly integrate into specialized tooling (suchas case management tools for legal professionals).

Key Considerations for Evaluating Content Management Systems

there may be an underlying assumptionthat all content is managed internally to anorganization, from creation to destruction.Although this can be a workable assump-tion in some cases, it does not represent theactual situation in most large organizations.

Managing internally generated materialas “content” and externally generatedmaterial as “something else” is a non-starter in many situations. Content thatarrives from outside often is both high-vol-ume and high-importance, and comes in awide variety of forms: letters, e-mails,invoices, surveys, etc. The rigid formatting,version control and even vocabulary con-trol expected by many ECM systems iscompletely inappropriate for such material.Attempting to pigeonhole information intorigid, predefined structures can be a majorimpediment to companies’ ability torespond to change.

Efficient processing of these kinds ofcontent requires tools that automaticallyexamine each item and make accurate decisions regarding subject matter, empha-sis and even sentiment. In the real world,businesses need to continually deal withinformation on a content-driven basis, notaccording to preconceived notions of howthat information should be organized.

Fortunately, powerful and proven tech-nologies are now enabling much greaterflexibility in the next generation of ECMsystems. These tools can quickly determine

the conceptual content of arbitrary docu-ments with an accuracy rivaling that ofhumans. They are even capable of deter-mining sentiment—Does a given e-mailreflect a customer that is mildly displeasedor one that is ready to sue? These tools canprovide an answer.

Recent advances allow information tobe dealt with in a totally concept-drivenfashion. It is possible today to take arbi-trary input such as letters, e-mails and sur-vey responses and, in a completely auto-mated process, detect major themes andsub-themes and organize them accordingly.Automatically generated understandablelabels can be applied to these themes andsub-themes. Such on-the fly taxonomiescan be generated at the rate of millions ofdocuments per day. This frees organiza-tions from the myriad limitations placed onthem by rigid, pre-defined structures suchas static taxonomies.

Challenge #2: Content Contains Errorsthat Can Hinder the Effectiveness of ECM

One of the most common shortcomingsof many new information-processing tech-nologies is that they ignore the effects oferrors in the material being processed. Inthe world of ad-hoc and externally generat-ed content, errors are a significant factor.

For some ECM systems, a significantportion of content is processed throughoptical character recognition (OCR) equip-ment. Unfortunately, OCR technology gen-erates a non-trivial number of errors andcorrecting such errors is very labor-inten-sive. E-mail also is replete with errors,including misspellings and text that is

Supplement to

Rising to the Real-WorldChallenges of ECM

Much has been written about the promise ofenterprise content management (ECM). Ini-tial efforts to implement ECM systems alreadyhave demonstrated the potential for achievingsignificant benefits. Organizations can achievecompetitive advantage by making faster, moreinformed decisions. They are recognizing thepotential for improving processes and in-creasing efficiency, and many companies arelooking to ECM to help them better complywith Sarbanes-Oxley regulations.

As with any area of strategic promise,however, ECM was bound to experiencegrowing pains as implementations met withcertain tactical real-world limitations. Asnoted by KMWorld editorial director AndyMoore in the 2004 edition of this white paper,ECM is at an awkward stage. Much of thisawkwardness stems from the sheer complex-ity of managing content in modern, large-scale organizations with complex operations.

In general, the problem stems from thefact that ECM is rising out of the conver-gence of markets for tools designed aroundsimplified world models. These toolsinclude electronic document management(EDM), records management (RM) andbusiness process management (BPM) technologies—each of which limit ECM’sability to address the variety of contentencountered in the enterprise environment.

The good news is that today’s ECM tech-nologies are overcoming these limitations.While new security and administration capa-bilities address the “enterprise” portion ofthe ECM equation, exciting developmentsare improving the “content management”side as well. Organizations now have anopportunity to further improve the returns on their ECM efforts, thanks to content management capabilities that address keyreal-world challenges:

Challenge #1: Content Comes in a WideVariety of Forms from Multiple Sources

One of the most important issues thatmust be addressed in the next wave ofECM implementations is that of flexibility.Because of their genesis, current ECM systems tend to be based on relatively simplistic world models. For example,

May 2005S18 KMWorld

Robert Liscouski is theCEO of Content AnalystCompany, LLC. ContentAnalyst technologyautomates humanactivity traditionallyassociated withunderstanding,organizing, prioritizingand retrieving relevantinformation from largesources of unstructureddata. Prior to joining

Content Analyst, Liscouski served as the first AssistantSecretary for Infrastructure Protection for theDepartment of Homeland Security. He also served insenior management positions at The Coca-ColaCompany and ORION Scientific Systems, and wasfounder and CEO of PoliTech Research, Inc., a providerof business intelligence services. In addition, he hasmore than 15 years’ prior experience with theIntelligence Community and in law enforcementinvestigation.To learn more about Content Analyst, visitwww.contentanalyst.com.

Robert LiscouskiBy Robert Liscouski, CEO, Content Analyst Company, LLC

“Organizations now

have an opportunity to

further improve the

returns on their ECM.”

May 2005 S19

ungrammatical and often not in the form ofcomplete sentences.

Existing ECM systems tend to relyheavily on keyword-based text processingcapabilities that are adversely affected byspelling errors. Although vendors incorpo-rate workarounds such as wildcards andfuzzy searches, these produce varyingdegrees of irrelevant information in affect-ed business processes. Systems reliant onlinguistic processing can yield erroneousresults when dealing with ungrammaticalsource material.

Today, tools exist that can deal effec-tively with content that contains significantamounts of errors in spelling and grammar.Content containing misspelled words canbe dealt with in a manner that does not gen-erate extraneous results. Content can beprocessed directly at a conceptual level,without requiring laborious and error-prone linguistic processing.

Challenge #3: Content Comes in ManyDifferent Languages

The United States only accounts forapproximately one-third of the world econ-omy, and less than one-third of Internetusers worldwide speak English as a nativelanguage. For many businesses, the abilityto deal with information in multiple lan-guages is a necessity.

While many ECM vendors have incor-porated capabilities for multilingual docu-ment processing, multilingual processing(i.e., the ability to process content in morethan one language) in and of itself is notsufficient for most global organizations.What really is needed is cross-lingual pro-cessing: the ability for a user working inone language to automatically carry outsearch, categorization and analysis activi-ties involving content in other languages.There have been attempts to address thisneed using machine translation software.However, the state-of-the-art in machinetranslation is simply not adequate to sup-port most business objectives.

A new class of cross-lingual informa-tion processing tools enables much-improved multilingual content applica-tions. For example, users can create a queryin one language that can search content inmultiple languages without requiring trans-lation of either the queries or all of the con-tent. They can create exemplars in one lan-guage that can be used to accurately cate-gorize content in other languages. They canimmediately understand the context of anunusual foreign word or acronym and canorganize and prioritize multilingual contentin order to re-purpose it.

The tools that make cross-lingual infor-mation processing possible employ con-ceptual representations of content that

work directly in the native languages. Thisavoids the inaccuracies and inconsistenciesinduced by contemporary machine-transla-tion systems.

Challenge #4: Organizations MustBalance Security with the Need toShare Information

Although most discussions of securityfor content center around access to particu-lar items, access control is only one part ofthe information sharing story. Legitimateconsiderations of privacy, legal, regulatoryor national security issues often precludeproviding some users with direct access tospecific content. Implementing only anaccess-control scheme will limit organiza-tional effectiveness in such environments.

Recent mechanisms of informationsharing exploit the ability to automaticallydetermine the conceptual nature of contentand to holistically extract relationshipinformation from collections of docu-ments. These capabilities allow the use ofrestricted content in new and excitingways. For example, restricted content canbe used in a background mode to greatlyimprove user efficiency and satisfaction indealing with non-restricted content. This isa win-win situation: the restricted contentis completely protected while, at the sametime, the implicit and high-order relation-ship information contained in this contentcan be leveraged in business processes.

Challenge #5: Users Do Not Have Time toOrganize Content or Create Vocabularies

Perhaps the most important metric for evaluating an information system is user acceptance. The nature of the user experience is critical to the future of ECM

systems. Users do not want to carry outtime-consuming tasks to overcome defi-ciencies in the underlying world models ofECM systems, and they do not want to dealwith rigid structures defined by others.Subject-matter experts do not want to craftand maintain taxonomies, ontologies andother auxiliary structures needed to propelsystem performance. No one wants to usecontrolled vocabularies in order toexchange information. Most users haveneither the time nor the inclination to man-ually create elaborate metadata headers andcomplex markup for content.

Thankfully, the need for users to spendlarge amounts of their time accommodat-ing software limitations is rapidly passing.Software capable of dealing with contenton a conceptual basis eliminates the needfor excessive manual intervention in themost irksome of activities. Such softwareallows a much higher degree of automationof routine content-processing functions.Users can then focus on value-added activities that exploit the unique patternrecognition, abstraction and planning capabilities of the human mind.

Mature Solutions Are Now Deliveringon the Promise of ECM

As noted by Forrester Research VPConnie Moore, the “administrative”aspects of content management are beingassimilated onto operating infrastructures.The basic functions of access, administra-tion and security are increasingly beingaddressed within operating systems andstorage architectures. This will greatlyfacilitate the advent of a new generation ofECM implementations capable of address-ing the problems of modern enterprises.Combined with the advent of concept-based tools that account for the complexi-ties of content management, the situation isextremely promising.

The pioneers in the field have establishedthe basic business case for ECM.Incorporation of modern tools will allowimplementation of ECM systems capable ofaddressing real-world problems in even thelargest organizations. The highly developedstate of such tools will speed the progressionof ECM to an elegant, mature solution thatplays a crucial role in enabling key process-es across the enterprise. ❚

Content Analyst technology delivers immediate value anywhere people are required to find relevant and actionable data within massive amounts of unstructured information. Based on a highlyrefined and extended application of our patented Latent SemanticIndexing (LSI) technology, Content Analyst technology easily integrates into current architectures without replacing existing tools,giving organizations the ability to organize,access and share informationacross multiple languages without the need for extensive humanintervention.To learn more, visit www.contentanalyst.com or contactus at info@contentanalyst.com or 1-800-863-0156.

KMWorldSupplement to

“Users do not want

to carry out

time-consuming

tasks to overcome

deficiencies in

ECM systems.”

”Re-Evaluating” Content Management

It’s likely that your organization standsto get a lot out of ECM, but what shouldyou look for in an ECM solution? Today,many ECM solutions claim vast featuresets that promise to increase efficiencies,save costs and drive revenues. Forinstance, there are many higher-end ECMsolutions that: provide common libraryservices to multiple corporate repositories;support most types of unstructured con-tent; provide extensive customization tomeet specific needs; enable business usersto find and reuse content quickly; providea library of applications tailored to specific industries or business issues; andprovide extensive scalability and high per-formance, availability and reliability.

Higher-end ECM solutions promisechampagne-class feature sets. However,these solutions can carry hidden costs thatimpose new infrastructure on IT staff,require high, ongoing professional servicefees, and force business users to endurelong implementation periods before thesystem is usable. In fact, if you can’t spendseven figures, you’re unlikely to get theattention you deserve from many of thesevendors.

On the other hand, lower-end ECM sys-tems can offer limited out-of-the-box fea-tures for a beer budget, but they often lackboth the flexibility and scalability to keeppace with your specific, evolving needs.

Therefore, if you seek a champagneECM feature set, most vendors will tell youto either pare down your requirements orcome up with a bigger budget. However,neither of these options is appealing.Luckily, you don’t need to sacrifice one forthe other. The key to getting a champagnefeature set at a beer budget lies in consider-ing how an ECM solution is delivered inaddition to what features it advertises.

ECM for the Rest of Us: Balance is CriticalA new category of ECM products has

emerged to satisfy those organizations thathave the champagne tastes for comprehen-sive and customizable ECM capabilities,but demand the fast implementation andaffordable price required by a beer budget.These products, such as PercussionSoftware’s Rhythmyx™ Enterprise ContentManagement System, balance substantialout-of-the-box feature sets with the cus-tomization flexibility to meet evolvingneeds using in-house skill sets.

Balanced ECM solutions deliver out-of-the-box features for immediate value,offering the following benefits:

◆ Deployment is rapid, since the system tiesinto your existing infrastructure ratherthan adding a new platform.

◆ Business users enjoy fast results withoutrelying on customization services to makethe system operational.

◆ Users adopt the system quickly, with lit-tle training, by leveraging familiar inter-faces as well as features that are inte-grated with popular products such asMicrosoft® Office.

◆ Business-focused capabilities allow forextensive content reuse across deliverychannels.

Balanced ECM solutions also provide thecustomization flexibility required to achievefuture goals. Customization capabilities areplaced in the hands of your IT organization,allowing them to adapt the solution to chang-ing requirements and new projects. Whenyou need to further customize the system, astandards-based architecture allows IT toleverage their existing skill sets to meet spe-cific requirements. An extensible ECM foun-dation sits on a single code base to supportall facets of content management.

If you seek fast time-to-value and com-prehensive, extensible capabilities, selectinga balanced ECM solution is a wise decision.In other words, with balanced ECM, you canhave “champagne tastes on a beer budget!” ❚

Percussion Software’s Rhythmyx ECM is uniquely designed to give organ-izations the best of both worlds,offering the perfect alternative to inflexi-ble,out-of-the-box, low-end products and expensive,high-end productsthat take too long to implement. A robust, scalable solution, Rhythmyxmanages Web and portal content,documents,digital assets,and scannedimages.More information is available at www.percussion.com.

Supplement to

Champagne Tastes on a Beer Budget

ECM for the Rest of Us

Enterprise content management (ECM) isone of the most widely used terms today inthe market for software applications. In-dustry analysts consistently put it right be-hind security in terms of interest from theircustomers. In fact, you’ve probably beentold that you need an ECM solution ifyou’ve been charged with any of the fol-lowing tasks:

◆ Create a centralized place for corporatedocuments, enabling end users to easilysearch and retrieve information;

◆ Find faster ways to update Internet,intranet and extranet sites without sacri-ficing accuracy;

◆ Ensure the correct use of logos and corporate brand elements;

◆ Provide compliance with legal and regu-latory requirements for retention and retrieval; and

◆ Create electronic versions of paper documents (e.g., invoices).

Each of these challenges points to lostopportunities that organizations face daily,as is evident from the following statistics:

◆ 81% of business activity is content-driven;◆ 90% of customer communication (and

hence customer satisfaction) is contentcentric;

◆ 60%-80% of knowledge workers can’tfind the information they need; and

◆ 90% of the creative work done by knowl-edge workers is actually recreating workthat already exists.

May 2005S20 KMWorld

By Vernon Imrich, CTO, Percussion Software

◆ Out-of-the-box capabilities for immediate results;

◆ Scalability to support all enterprise content across multiple deliverychannels; and

◆ An extensible foundation that sits on a common code base to address all facets of content management.

The Balanced ECM Solution

Supplement to May 2005 S21

to be tailored to meet their needs. Theywant all the content that is relevant withoutany information that does not apply. Usingtraditional publishing software to producetailored publications is too costly and time-consuming to be practical on a medium orlarge scale.

◆ Dynamic content—If portions of the con-tent change frequently (such as prices oravailability), or if the content is assembledon demand based on individual consumerrequests, traditional publishing softwarecontains little or no support for such re-quirements.

◆ Interactive Content—The Web—and tovarying degrees other electronic deliverymedia—are great at providing an interac-tive experience to the consumer. Featuressuch as advanced navigations aids, hy-perlinks and dynamically showing or hid-ing content engage the consumer and pro-vide a faster, more satisfying experience.However, when you convert a word pro-cessing or desktop publishing documentto a Web-friendly format, you must man-ually add these features. Web usability ex-perts have pointed out that PDF docu-ments usually offer an inferior interactiveuser experience and that your customers

vastly prefer HTML, the Web standard forinformation delivery.ECM alone does not address the issue

of how your organization creates themajority of your content and only partiallyaddresses the need to automate andimprove the content publishing process.

But I Thought My ECM Vendor Provided it All

Many ECM vendors promote theirproducts as “solving the content problem,”so it’s understandable that many peoplebelieve that ECM provides all of the tech-nology they need. Moreover, many ECMsystems provide content creation anddynamic publishing capabilities, whichmake such systems look, at first glance,like complete solutions.

For example, some ECM systems provideWeb-based forms for controlled content cre-ation and some include in-place editing ofHTML pages in a browser. These applica-tions, while useful for some types of content,cannot solve the needs of publishing to awide variety of formats and are poor at han-dling longer, more complex content.

More advanced ECM systems providesome features for automated publishing suchas batch conversion of word processing doc-uments to HTML or PDF. This capabilitycan be useful as a quick—but limited—wayof getting your documents distributed elec-tronically. But this approach does not easilyor automatically provide Web output that iscustomized, dynamic and interactive.

Why not? Because the automated processof converting word processing documents toHTML or PDF is, by necessity, unsophisti-cated. For example, an ECM system canautomatically publish word processing filesto the Web by using the word processor’s“Save as HTML” capability. The resultingHTML document looks very much like theoriginal word processing document, but theprocess does nothing to enhance the contentto take advantage of interactive Web features.Such enhancements could include automati-cally breaking up long documents into short-er Web pages, providing hyperlinked tablesof contents and indexes and automaticallyenhancing part numbers in the document tobecome hyperlinks targeted at an e-com-merce site to allow easy purchasing. ❚

Arbortext is the leading provider of Enterprise Publishing Software thatenables organizations to create and automatically publish large amountsof information,such as technical manuals,pharmaceutical product infor-mation, legal information and software documentation. Enterprisesaround the world use our software to publish in multiple languages tomultiple audiences in multiple hardcopy and electronic output formats.Arbortext’s software is installed at over 1,700 organizations worldwide.Headquartered in Ann Arbor,Michigan,USA,Arbortext has offices aroundthe world.For more information,please visit www.arbortext.com.

Automated Publishing is More Than ECM

What defines a formal publishing process?When should an organization consider notonly adopting ECM but also adopting an au-tomated approach to publishing? You shouldconsider evaluating the benefits of replacingtraditional desktop publishing or word pro-cessing software if your content has one ormore of the following characteristics:◆ Multichannel delivery—When you

have to deliver content in print, on theWeb, in online help, to wireless devices,or to additional formats and media types,traditional publishing software requiresyou to assign someone to manually for-mat your content for each different me-dia type.

◆ Large volume—The more content youcreate, the more costly the use of tradi-tional publishing software (where an au-thor can spend as much as half the timeformatting—a waste of time and money).

◆ Repeatable processes—The more fre-quently you create and publish documentsof a particular type, such as datasheets,technical manuals or regulatory submis-sions, the more consistent the documentsshould be in style and structure.

◆ Customized content—Consumers of in-formation increasingly expect information

KMWorld

By David White, VP of Product Strategy, Arbortext

Companies store their financial information in databases because a databaseprovides security, data verification and a single source from which a variety of reportscan be automatically generated. This enables companies to ensure their financialinformation is always accurate, up-to-date and consistent wherever it is used.

Using desktop publishing software to manage your organization’s intellectualcontent is like implementing a financial reporting application using spreadsheetfiles stored on individual users’ desktops. Without constraining data entrythrough input forms that interactively guide the user and prevent errors, the datainput into this financial system would require manual interpretation and clean-upevery time you changed or added data. If each user could modify the spread-sheets as they see fit, the data embedded in those spreadsheets would quicklybecome impossible to automate, difficult to use and inflexible to meet new needs.Without the ability to automate calculations and report generation, the systemwould collapse.

Why Desktop Apps Fall Short

◆ As technology has evolved, user complex-ities have been overcome. The tasks asso-ciated with creating, editing and publishingcontent and documents, supporting collab-orative projects and managing dynamicWeb properties are being automated anddistributed to many people inside organi-zations. This is enabling new efficienciesand cost-savings, without burdensome up-front training or ongoing support—whileremoving the threat of project failure dueto lack of adoption.

◆ To support rapid implementation and useamong mid-market companies, contentand document management solutions aredelivering environments familiar to ITstaff (such as the Microsoft Windows op-erating system, the .NET Framework, Mi-crosoft databases, application servers anddeveloper tools) and also to business pro-fessionals (such as Microsoft Word, Out-look and Windows Explorer).

◆ Finally, mid-size companies can take ad-vantage of advanced features once associ-ated only with enterprise-level content anddocument management solutions. These in-clude support for translation and localizationto reach new global markets; compliancesupport to meet government or industrymandates; and structured information in-dexing that provides powerful search optionsto reduce the time it takes knowledge work-ers and site visitors to find information.

The “Solution Evolution”This all amounts to good news for any

mid-sized organization seeking to bettermanage Web content and document strate-gies. Solutions such as Ektron’s, built withthe mid-market in mind, have evolved toyield significant and measurable benefits, let-ting you gain competitive parity and even anadvantage against larger, more resource-richorganizations.

Integrated content and document manage-ment solutions provide new reasons to consid-er adopting a solution that can help leverageyour information assets. Consider these bene-fits now within reach of mid-size organizations.

Standards-based interoperability:Relying on non-proprietary, industry-stan-dard approaches ensures integration time-lines and cost limits can be met, while alsoreducing long-term burden on IT.

User adoption: When distributed knowl-edge workers can easily contribute to Website and document management strategies,project success is more assured.

Value: Solutions that respect real-worldIT budgets and deployment timelines, whilealso delivering a solid depth of functionality,offer high value to mid-size organizations.

Multiple content and document deliveryoptions: This enables your organization tosupport new modes of distributing infor-mation, including RSS feeds, blog publish-ing and multi-site content management.

Globalization: Robust multilingual capa-bilities support requirements to enter new mar-kets and leverage new business opportunities.

Corporate automation: Not just a pass-ing buzzword, efficiency is a mid-marketmandate to ensure maximum employee out-put and long-term profitability. (Ektron solu-tions support Web-based collaboration tohelp organizations meet this imperative.)

Compliance: Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA andother legislation put pressure on organizationsto ensure appropriate internal controls andreporting systems. The mid-market can answerthis call with a compliance-friendly contentand document management solution. ❚

Ektron’s software solutions streamline business and publishingprocesses and help organizations unlock the value of corporate infor-mation. At the same time, Ektron’s solutions enable organizations tolower content- and document-lifecycle costs, comply with regulatoryrequirements and unify the efforts of distributed knowledge workers.Ektron has more than 13,000 customer integrations worldwide,including Intel, Pfizer, Celestica and Unilever. Headquartered inAmherst, New Hampshire, Ektron has offices throughout Europe.Visitwww.ektron.com to find out how Ektron helps organizations managepeople, process and information.

Supplement to

New Realities for Mid-Market Content andDocument Management

Mid-size organizations have frequentlyfound themselves in the rather awkward po-sition of being “stuck in the middle” whenit comes to finding the right solution for ef-fectively managing, publishing and sharingonline content, digital documents and othermission-critical assets.

Large content management solutionproviders have proffered solutions that—though they may be sized appropriately forthe Global 2000—don’t always effectivelyscale down to meet the needs of organiza-tions with finite IT resources, limited budgetsand tight integration timelines.

Conversely, lightweight tools that letknowledge workers publish content to theWeb are available in abundance. However,they simply don’t provide the robust func-tionality such as security, workflows, ver-sioning and compliance support necessaryto bring order and accountability to infor-mation-management processes.

However, new options exist for mid-size organizations as well as small busi-ness and even departments within largeenterprises. These entities should carefullyevaluate and choose content and documentmanagement solutions.

Software designed specifically to meetthe unique requirements and preferences ofmid-market organizations have matured,while price points have dropped. Theseproducts now provide true alternatives tocomplex and costly solutions that have pre-vented many organizations from confidentlytaking the next step to solve their informa-tion management challenges.

CM/DM RealitiesConsider your ideas about content and

document management solutions andmeasure them against these new realities:◆ It’s no longer a $500,000 proposition, or

even a $50,000 proposition, to adopt an ef-fective, standalone or integrated contentand document management solution. Scal-able solutions, built on industry standardswith out-of-the-box functionality, arewithin reach of most organizations.

May 2005S22 KMWorld

A solid foundation inproduct and businessdevelopment hasallowed Bill Rogers toco-found threesuccessful businesses.At Zydacron Inc., Rogersled the organization’stransition from asystems consultant to aleading desktopvideoconferencingdevelopment firm.

As a co-founder of Global Telemedix, Rogersspearheaded key strategic relationships withcompanies such as Hewlett- Packard Medical ProductsGroup, IBM and British Telecom.

In his most recent initiative, Ektron, Rogers hasassembled a team to offer authoring tools and contentmanagement solutions, including first-of-their-kindapplications that enable organization-wide,Webcontent management by non-technical professionals.

Bill Rogers

By Bill Rogers, CEO and Founder, Ektron Inc.

Supplement to May 2005 S23

content such as Printlists, SAP-generateddocuments, scanned images, Web content,e-mails, instant messages and audio andvideo files.

SAP archiving enables better SAP appli-cation performance, IT consolidation andincreased compliance. Using a documentmanagement infrastructure, such asDocumentum, companies are able to archiveSAP structured data using the SAP ArchiveDevelopment Kit (ADK). They are also ableto archive SAP unstructured data, such asPrintlists and generated documents, usingDocumentum’s integrations to SAP’sArchivelink.

A Tiered Strategy for SAP and EDM Integration

A comprehensive SAP archiving andEDM requirements strategy should be tar-geted at a specific level of archiving or EDMuser requirements, yet be expanded incre-mentally by adding higher-value yet morecomplex archiving or EDM capabilities:

◆ Essential SAP Archiving. An essentialarchiving strategy addresses pure SAPdata, report and document archiving re-quirements. It should include both man-ual and high-volume automated archiv-ing, using SAP ADK and Archivelinkinterfaces. Installation and configurationeffort should be minimal and benefit userswho may not have a defined EDM or stor-age strategy.

◆ Enhanced SAP Archiving. An enhancedarchiving strategy should add a layer ofintelligence by classifying and categoriz-ing archived files into folders and byreplicating SAP data as descriptive meta-data. This enables files, reports and doc-uments to be used for retention, storagemanagement or broader EDM needs.

◆ SAP EDM. EDM requirements require asignificant layer of EDM functionalityand client applications for improved SAPbusiness process efficiency, such as the fi-nance, plant maintenance and HR. Two ways in which an EDM platform

enhances SAP:1. Contextual access to SAP documents

and content. Easy access to supportingdocuments from within the SAP applica-tion, module and business object stream-lines business processes, reduces costs andincreases service levels. It’s enabled bybackground automation services, linkingdocuments to specific SAP objects.

2. Powerful repository services andworkflow from within SAP. Users need tointeract with supporting documents, such asviewing, editing and approving them. Forexample, a circuit board designer using SAPProduct Lifecycle Management to work on asubassembly of a BOM may want to modifyor reference the circuit board drawing. Thedesign process is made more efficient by giv-ing the designer easier document access andpowerful repository services, such as theability to search, browse, edit and view thecircuit board drawing, using the appropriateapplications.

A comprehensive archiving and EDMstrategy must incorporate a modular designwhich allows IT and SAP administrators totackle critical SAP archiving requirementsand then add additional, higher value EDMapplications for SAP. An example of an EDMapplication would be invoice processing,which would use Documentum’s documentmanagement infrastructure, along with scan-ning and imaging solutions, to streamlineSAP finance accounts payables and receiv-ables. Another example would be managingengineering documents to streamline SAPplant maintenance. Yet another example,would be using a consolidated employeedocument folder to streamline SAP HR ben-efits processing. ❚

To learn more about EMC Documentum Content Services for SAP, visitus at www.documentum.com/sap.

Managing High Volumesof Data in SAP

Companies are deluged by applicationdata and documents. Some analysts say thisdata is growing at 80% per year. This rapiddata growth complicates IT issues such assystem availability, performance and re-source utilization. It frustrates strategies forcorporate and regulatory compliance. In re-sponse, many companies are consolidatingtheir IT environment, reducing the numberof SAP R/3 instances, networks, applica-tion servers and databases. Consolidationreduces total cost of ownership (TCO)across the entire IT infrastructure by sim-plifying software version upgrades and re-ducing backup and recovery windows, thusimproving system availability. Consolida-tion also makes the underlying storage in-frastructure more efficient.

One aspect of consolidation consistsof archiving SAP data including struc-tured data—essentially rows and columnsin the database, backing the SAP R/3 system—as well as unstructured data.Unstructured data comprises all types of supporting electronic documents and

KMWorld

By George Viebeck, Sr. Product Manager, EMC Documentum

An early innovator in SAP archiving, EMC Documentum released its firstSAP archiving application in 1997. EMC Documentum® Content Services forSAP enables customers to safely and securely archive SAP data, Printlistreports and documents into a safe and secure document repository. And itenables these assets to be consolidated, managed, accessed and reused byboth SAP and non-SAP users.

Content Services for SAP EDM utilizes a comprehensive set of DocumentumEDM services that can be assembled to create simple and complex EDM applications. Examples include invoice approval, report generation, engineeringdesign approval, marketing content development, contracts management and callcenter applications. When used alongside the corresponding SAP application, significant business process efficiency can be achieved.

EMC Documentum Content Services for SAP offers a unique package oftiered, modular, fully supported solutions that support a variety of SAP archiving and EDM scenarios. SAP archiving enables better SAP applicationperformance, IT consolidation and increased compliance. EDM applicationshelp streamline existing SAP applications through tightly integrated documentmanagement.

Tiered Approach to SAP Archiving and EDM Applications

quickly and easily—and inexpensively.New solutions can also leverage existingsystems, which are “wrappered” to providea service-oriented interface to their dataand actions.

As embodied in Interwoven’s currentECM platform, the SOA makes it possible toreplace a suite of separate content manage-ment applications with a unified contentapplication framework. The full range of coreECM functionality can be exposed as servic-es, allowing content type-specific capabilities

to be invoked seamlessly from compositeapplications, external packaged applications,third-party portal servers and businessprocess automation systems. Freed from theconstraints of a dedicated interface, userswould not need to be “in” an Interwovenapplication to submit Web content, approve amedia asset, archive a document as a corpo-rate record or provision code and content toa production system. Integration becomes asimple matter, often requiring no code at all.

The business benefits of SOA-basedECM are broad and compelling. Contentsolutions can become larger in scope, inte-grating a wider range of content types.Development and integration become moreagile, flexible and responsive to the needsof trading partners.

Consider the case of marketing cam-paign management: The campaign manag-er first reviews past campaigns in the CRM

system for audience and success criteria.Extracted data and content then become thestarting point for the new campaign, sup-plemented by new text, graphics and richmedia content. This content then goesthrough a cycle of review, revision andapproval, partner collaboration, testing andthen deployment. Finally, the new cam-paign is logged into the CRM system fortracking and analysis.

With an SOA-based composite applica-tion, this entire process can take placewithin a single Web interface—includingmultiple content types in separate reposito-ries, as well as in external business sys-tems. The solution is fast and simple todeploy, and easily maintained over time.And this is only one example. As the SOA-based ECM solution makes enterprise con-tent and ECM functionality available toadditional solutions throughout the compa-ny, the cost savings and business impactare multiplied many times over.

SOA is still a relatively new idea in ECM;its benefits are more easily understood by ITpersonnel than the line-of business managerswho make purchasing decisions. From anenterprise standpoint, adopting SOA can seem

daunting. But trends in both business require-ments and enterprise technology point clearlyto SOA as the future of ECM. As its adoptionspreads, a new generation of composite solu-tions will bring new levels of productivity andefficiency to companies—and forever changethe way we think about ECM. ❚

Charles Hough is Vice President of Field and Platform Marketing atInterwoven. He leads the company’s ECM platform marketing, fieldtraining, technical marketing, product management, and theInterwoven Developers Network (DevNet).

Interwoven provides enterprise content management (ECM) solutionsfor business, enabling organizations to unify people, content andprocesses to minimize business risk,accelerate time-to-value and sus-tain lower total cost of ownership.With blue-chip customers in everymajor vertical market, Interwoven leads the industry with a service-oriented architecture and delivers ECM solutions designed to addressspecific business processes such as e-mail management, intranets,enterprise Web content management, deal management, marketingcontent management and more.

Supplement to

A Service-OrientedArchitecture for Better ECM

New business requirements are changingthe way companies think about enterprisesoftware. Initiatives and objectives increas-ingly cross traditional boundaries to involvemultiple departments, data stores and busi-ness processes. In response, the old modelof self-contained applications is giving wayto a new paradigm based on independentservices brought together in dynamic,highly-efficient composite applications.The impact of this service-oriented archi-tecture (SOA) is only now beginning toreach the enterprise content management(ECM) market—but its transformative im-plications are already clear.

To date, ECM has typically consisted ofseparate applications for managing Web con-tent, revisable documents, e-mail, collabora-tion, rich media and archival records—eachwith its own dedicated server, capabilities,workflows and user interface. As long as acompany’s processes remain confined withinthese islands of automation, all is well. Butonce the need arises for cross-functionalbusiness integration, so do numerous prob-lems. Business applications incorporatingmultiple content types—not to mention thosethat integrate with external systems—are dif-ficult to develop and deploy, requiring cus-tom code to bridge different APIs, interfacesand platforms. Agility and responsivenesssuffer, while costs rise.

The service-oriented paradigm funda-mentally alters this picture. With SOA, busi-ness applications and systems are no longerself-contained monoliths, but collections ofindependent services that can be providedupon request to users or other applications.Using open standards, these services cutacross disparate platforms, object modelsand programming languages to integrate thedata and actions of multiple backend sys-tems within a single end-user solution.

SOA also enables business-processsolutions that automate multi-step process-es—for example, tracking the activities ofthe participants in a process, or synchroniz-ing data across multiple backend systems.

Unlike painstakingly coded customsolutions, SOA-based composite applicationscan be designed, deployed and maintained

May 2005S24 KMWorld

By Charles Hough, Vice President, Field and Platform Marketing, Interwoven

“As the ECM solution makes content

and functionality available throughout the

company, the cost savings and business impact

are multiplied many times over.”

Supplement to May 2005 S25

Improving access to documents can alsosupport more efficient interaction throughoutdistributed locations and allow companies toconsider strategies for operational changesthat reduce costs. For one company, thismeant the ability to create a shared-servicesgroup that supports 50 business units. Thisallowed them to take advantage of economiesof scale in an area where labor is less expen-sive and still apply specific rules for eachbusiness unit and involve thousands of usersaround the country in the approval process.

These operational enhancements can beextended to business partners as well. As

technology evolves, organizations are chang-ing the ways they share information. An APsolution that handles only paper invoices maynot account for electronic transactions, faxesand e-mails in the future.

Fundamentally, an ECM solution shouldsupport continuous process improvement,both from the solution itself and the knowl-edge it provides. For example, one Floridacounty agency processing 10,000 invoices amonth used workflow tools to gain unprece-dented information about employee strengths.The visibility into the actual process showedthat some clerks were better verifiers, whileothers excelled at data entry or decision-mak-ing associated with exceptions. Based on thatinformation, administrators were able toassign work more appropriately with a fewsimple configuration changes.

Content + Data =Better Decision-making, Faster

Throughout AP processes, access toboth content and data are necessary to makedecisions and take appropriate action.Integrating ECM technologies with data-centric AP line-of-business (LOB) applica-tions enables AP staff to access supportingdocuments through the interface of thebusiness application where they performmost of their daily work.

A sound ECM solution should be able tocontent-enable LOB applications in a man-ner that is totally transparent to users. As oneend-user put it, “Our AP clerks didn’t knowit was a separate product. They thought itwas an imaging enhancement to SAP.”

Be advised, however, content-enablingAP applications shouldn’t be a long-termcommitment to services or even the solutionitself. Any solution that requires a signifi-cant amount of custom coding is going to beexpensive to implement and to maintain.What happens if you upgrade or replaceyour core application? Don’t buy an APsolution that puts you at the mercy of a ven-dor or imprisons you to a certain way ofdoing things.

Plan Strategically, Proceed Tactically Experts agree that most organizations are

moving toward standardization of enterpriseplatforms, and there is virtually no depart-ment that can’t benefit from ECM technolo-gy. ECM for AP is a cost-justifiable way toestablish a beachhead for an enterprise-widecontent management strategy.

Implementing point solutions withinthe strategic framework that an ECM suiteprovides reduces the complexity and costof content management and can enhancecommunication and collaboration. Forinstance, if invoices are used for pass-through billing in industries such as con-struction, couldn’t accounts receivable(AR) benefit from the solution? Wouldsalespeople like to be able to view invoicesfrom CRM or call-center applications?

Just as your ECM investment should addvalue and contain costs throughout your APoperations, it should quickly and inexpen-sively roll out across other departments,processes and applications to deliver maxi-mum value across your organization. ❚

Hyland Software develops OnBase, a suite of enterprise content man-agement software that combines integrated document management,workflow and records management capabilities in a single applica-tion.OnBase is used by businesses and government agencies to auto-mate business processes, reduce the time and cost of performingimportant business functions, improve organizational efficiency andaddress the need for regulatory compliance through the manage-ment, control and sharing of digital content with employees, businesspartners, customers and other constituencies.Visit www.onbase.comfor more information.

ECM for Accounts Payable:It Pays—Faster!

Why would I want to pay my bills faster?That’s the question some people ask when wetalk about the value of using ECM software,such as document imaging and workflow, tostreamline accounts payable (AP) processes.Maybe the better question is: What is it cost-ing me to continue business as usual? Ac-cording to PayStream Advisors, a technologyresearch and consulting firm, whether an or-ganization is processing 100,000 invoices ayear or two million, automated invoicing cutscosts by an estimated 59% over manual processing. Regardless of the size of an organization, manual invoice processingtracked with a spreadsheet makes it difficultto remain competitive while meeting costly internal or external compliance requirements.

On the other hand, the benefits of applyingECM technology to AP processes include:◆ Shorter cycle times, increasing early-pay

discounts and decreasing late-pay penalties;◆ Better information sharing with author-

ized employees;◆ Improved customer service;◆ Significant labor reductions; and◆ Visibility into liabilities and process his-

tory that support regulatory complianceand corporate accountability initiatives.

Process Improvements Pay OffA good ECM solution for AP should mir-

ror the most effective elements of your APprocess while eliminating the most tedious.Automated workflow, for example, can bedesigned to reflect and optimize your currentbusiness rules for invoice approval, routinginvoices to appropriate managers and kickingoff related business tasks. The resultingprocess improvements can reduce cycletimes and create measurable benefits. Forexample, automated workflow enabled onemulti-billion-dollar communications compa-ny to save more than $13 million in less thanone year by enabling its AP shared-servicesgroup to consistently take advantage of earlypayment discounts.

Workflow can significantly improveaccountability as well. The risk of lost doc-uments in the black hole of inter-officemail is eliminated and an audit trail is cre-ated that can contribute to best practice andcompliance initiatives.

KMWorld

By A. J. Hyland, President and CEO, Hyland Software

“A good ECM solution

for AP should mirror

the most effective

elements of your AP

process while

eliminating the most

tedious.”

information) as a powerful way to classify andidentify content so that it can be presented anddisplayed in a timely, targeted and meaningfulway for users. Effective use of metadata willenable an organization to significantlyincrease the findability, readability and usabil-ity of site content while also enhancing itsoverall value. Classification of content alsoaffords the benefit of data discovery, which isoften equally important to users.

An excellent complement to metadata, tax-onomy-based content classification provides away to record relationships that exists betweena collection of terms or subjects. When contentis associated with one or more terms, it inher-its the properties and relationships of thoseterms, thus reducing the time and expenseinvolved with categorizing new content. Onceyou’ve efficiently categorized your content,you will be in a position to dynamically dis-play and reuse it throughout your site.

Invigorate your Content:Dynamic Pages & Navigation

Web content is increasingly becomingdynamic as organizations strive to delivermore up-to-date and relevant content to sitevisitors. Managing changing or dynamic con-tent has been and continues to be a dauntingtask. Today’s WCMS's are stepping up to thechallenge of maintaining content that is fluidin nature by offering tools that allow you toautomatically generate, display and updatecontent based on its categorization and meta-data criteria. Through content scheduling,content repurposing, content expiration andpersonalization you can quickly and easilymake site updates, increase user productivityand ensure that content is always timely, tar-geted and accessible to your audiences.

Extend the Value of Your Content:Content Objects & Content Reuse

The ability to structure content intoreusable “content objects” and separate pres-

entation from form, adds significantly to thevalue of content and offers several compellingbenefits beyond the obvious of simplifiedpublishing and increased user productivity.Content that is now structured can easily bereused and repurposed across a Web site,and/or syndicated and consumed in multipleformats (XML, RSS/Web Services) acrossdisparate systems. This not only improves thequality, accuracy and consistency of content,but also greatly reduces Web content creationand maintenance costs.

Implementing a WCMS to empowerusers to quickly and easily manage their owncontent continues to offer significant benefitsto organizations: reduced strain on Web andIT staff, more efficient staff utilization,reduced costs, and streamlined Web mainte-nance processes. However, there is muchmore to be gained. Metadata and taxonomy,dynamic content generation, content objectsand content reuse offer organizations the ability to:◆ More efficiently and affordably create

and manage Web content;◆ Repurpose and reuse content;◆ Deliver timely, targeted and accessible

content;◆ Improve content value;◆ Further reduce ongoing operational costs;

and◆ Realize rapid ROI.

If your organization is considering anenterprise or Web content management sys-tem implementation, you'll want to be sureyou know everything there is to know abouttoday’s available WCMS solutions. And,you'll want to make sure you arm yourselfwith the functionality to help you manageyour content in the most efficient and cost-effective manner. A clear understanding ofthe benefits of today’s advanced and nextgeneration WCMS features will ensure youselect a solution that’s best aligned with yourcontent management strategy. ❚

Since 1993, PaperThin has helped organizations of all sizes to signifi-cantly reduce the time and expense involved in creating,updating andmanaging Web content.PaperThin’s CommonSpot™ Content Server isa leading Web publishing and content management solution thatexcels at delivering feature-rich functionality at an affordable price.CommonSpot’s unique out-of-the-box framework and flexible archi-tecture offers rapid implementation, ease of use and powerful cus-tomization, integration and scalability capabilities.

Organizations like Baptist Healthcare System,Cornell University,Marshall& Ilsley Corporation, Mayo Clinic, National Park Service, Sevin RosenFunds,The Gillette Company,Voice of America and Wells Manufacturingdepend on CommonSpot to efficiently and affordably manage their Web initiatives.

For more information about CommonSpot,call us at 800.940.3087,visitour Web site at www.paperthin.com or email us at info@paperthin.com.

Supplement to

What You DON’T KnowAbout Web ContentManagement

As digital content continues to grow at anexponential rate, organizations increasinglystruggle with ways to affordably and effi-ciently create and manage content on the Web.Issues pertaining to content timeliness andquality, content duplication, content organi-zation and content retrieval are challenges thatcontinue to plague many organizations. Find-ing a solution that addresses these challengesis, for many, a top priority, and requires acloser look at today’s available Web contentmanagement offerings.

Many people think that Web contentmanagement is just about putting easy to useauthoring tools into the hands of contentowners to empower them to quickly and eas-ily publish content to the Web. Features likeWYSIWYG editing, template-driven pages,workflow and approval processes and ver-sion history are attributes of any contentmanagement system that purports to breakdown the Webmaster “bottleneck” and cre-ate efficiency in the Web publishing process.

But the truth is, today’s advanced Webcontent management systems (WCMS) haveevolved into more robust solutions. They aredelivering benefits and a level of functionali-ty that’s beyond what buyers have come to expect from early WCMS solutions.Advanced features like flexible metadata andtaxonomy classification, dynamic contentgeneration, content objects and content reuseare redefining content management, deliver-ing greater value and introducing better effi-ciencies in how content is created, classified,organized, presented and retrieved.

Classify Your Content:Metadata & Taxonomy

The manner in which content is created,organized, presented and retrieved has adirect influence on how much value can bederived from the content. As the sheer volumeof digital content continues to grow, manag-ing it becomes increasingly problematic. To address this challenge, organizations must rely on metadata (information about

May 2005S26 KMWorld

By Todd Peters, Founder & President, PaperThin, Inc.

May 2005 S27

handling. A big company with 15,000employees can get 250,000 resumes a year.Handling these electronically in a central-ized system is “triply” valuable: there arehard dollar savings; there’s competitiveadvantage by cutting response time; andyou can show that you’re treating peoplefairly in your hiring practices. Differentpeople in the organization see these differ-ent sets of value. Managers with P&Lresponsibilities see the dollar savings; hir-ing managers know they can get good peo-ple right away; and the legal departmentcan point to a good track record. Everyonecan see right away how content manage-ment benefits them.

Ethan Eisner, LexisNexis: We look at useradoption in two ways: first is the accept-ance of our content and the value per-ceived there; and secondly, the overalladoption of content—both internal andexternal—across the board. Whetheryou’re looking at our platform alone, orECM across the organization, user adop-tion is probably the most critical successfactor. Everything we do is there toincrease adoption and satisfaction.

Johannes Scholtes, ZyLAB: Enhancinguser adoption is a step-by-step process.For instance, paper is still a major prob-lem. If you take away the problems ofpaper and leave the convenience of paper,you solve a lot of problems for end users.Having done that, you can demonstrate theadvantages and get great user adoption.Then you go onto electronic files, and thento e-mails. At the end of the day, it evolvesinto an enterprise solution, without havingto buy a large database solution upfrontand figure out how you want to deploy itover the long term.

Andrew Pery, Hummingbird: Specificsolutions will drive this market. Managingcontracts, for example—there’s a lifecycleto a contract that includes a lot of integra-tion with applications, such as supplychain from SAP or Siebel. In contractmanagement, for every transaction thatoccurs, there are about 10 to12 separateinteractions. In a Fortune 1,000 company,there are anywhere from 20,000 to 40,000contracts pending at any given time, dis-tributed all over the map, with very fewpeople to administer them. End-user solu-tions will be driven by this kind of specif-ic business problem. There will be a seriesof these specific solutions that have enter-prise-wide implications in how youdeploy them.

George Viebeck, Documentum: In life sci-ences, the management of clinical trials andFDA requirements is very acute. Productrecalls by the FDA in the pharmaceuticalindustry have underscored not only aware-ness of content management, but that there’s

a corresponding set of requirements down-stream. There are many physicians usingdrug companies’ products, and you have toprovide detailed product information in auser-friendly way-via e-mail, or a personal-ized portal or even through wireless com-munications. The distribution channels (forcontent) are very broad these days, andthat’s another role for ECM to play.

PG Bartlett, Arbortext: Publishing—which includes creating, reviewing,approving, assembling, formatting anddelivering document information—is oneof the most important processes that relieson ECM. By automating this process andintegrating it with other business systems,enterprises can vastly improve the qualityof the information they deliver to theircustomers, employees, investors or regu-lators, while also cutting costs and time-to-market. It’s an irresistible combinationof benefits that our customers alreadyenjoy, and most of them build their enter-prise publishing systems on top of anECM system.

Dan Ryan, Stellent: We make a distinc-tion between the users of intranet portals,and those who create and publish the con-tent. We want the dozen or so actual usersof content management to know they’reinteracting with the ECM system as little aspossible. We want the viewers of content toNOT know they’re interacting with theECM system AT ALL.

There are tiers of users. First, there arethe great masses who have no knowledgethey are interacting with the system...theyhave a folder metaphor where they dropcontent in and magic happens. That’s thelargest number of users, so if you want tosucceed in enterprise content manage-ment, you need to get those people usingthe product day-to-day. After that are themuch smaller numbers of power users(who DO interact with the metadata andapplications) and then there’s IT andinformation architect planners. You needto address down that pyramid as far asyou can...that’s how you get people ontothe system.

4. What are the economic factors driv-ing ECM today? Does ROI rule thepurchase of content management asit does other applications?

Tom Jenkins, Open Text: About 55% ofour recent business has been driven by acombination of demand for productivityand the need for compliance. Customersare trying to find a silver lining in thecloud. They’re required to adhere to regula-tion, but at the same time they’re trying toget productivity gains from that sameinvestment.

The ROIs are much, much greater at theenterprise level than the department level.People are starting to realize that. The irony

is, they’re being forced into it by compli-ance—they’re creating enterprise-wideknowledge repositories that, later on, aregoing to be very useful.

Ethan Eisner, LexisNexis: Customers arelooking for ways to enhance their invest-ment in content management. We’re a con-tent provider, but customers want to bringus in as a value-add to the investmentthey’ve already made in their CM system.For example, better ways to organize infor-mation, better ways to push it out to theright audience at the right time, etc.

PG Bartlett, Arbortext: Implementingtechnology while promising zero impact isjust foolish—the whole point is to get theorganization to change its behavior inorder to gain the benefits that ECM prom-ises. Enterprise publishing software offersgreat benefits only to organizations thatare willing to endure significant changes.It’s vital to show the users that if they arewilling to change, they will increase theirvalue to the organization in significant andmeasurable ways.

Tom Jenkins, Open Text: Clients oftendo an ROI analysis before making aninvestment in ECM, but once it’s up andrunning, the payback is so self-evident,they stop measuring just how much valuethey’re getting! That, of course, makes itdifficult to demonstrate what these ROIsare over many years...

At the end of the day, enterprise contentmanagement is not all that mysterious, butit is also not as ubiquitous as you mightthink as you read these pages. As Stellent’sDan Ryan points out, “A broadly deployedintranet is probably the closest thing to anenterprise-wide deployment of contentmanagement there is.”

But the inescapable common theme thatruns through these experts’ comments andthe essays that follow is this: Whether youview it as a tactical solution or a strategicimperative, enterprise content managementhas entered the corporate lexicon. Don’tworry too much if you haven’t given con-tent management enough thought. You willsoon enough. ❚

Andy Moore is a 25-year publishing professional,editor and writer whoconcentrates on business process improvement through document andcontent management.As a publication editor,Moore most recently waseditor-in-chief and co-publisher of KMWorld Magazine. He is nowpublisher of KMWorld Magazine and its related online publications.

As Editorial Director for the Specialty Publishing Group, Moore acts aschair for the “KMWorld Best Practices White Papers”and the “EContentLeadership” series, overseeing editorial content, conducting marketresearch and writing the opening essays for each of the white papersin the series.

Moore has been fortunate enough to cover emerging areas of appliedtechnology for much of his career, ranging from telecom and net-working through to information management.In this role,he has beenpleased to witness first-hand the decade’s most significant businessand organizational revolution: the drive to leverage organizational

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For information on participating in the next white paper in the “Best Practices” series. contact:paul_rosenlund@kmworld.com or kathy_rogals@kmworld.com • 207.338.9870

Kathryn Rogals Paul Rosenlund Andy Moore207-338-9870 207-338-9870 207-236-0331kathy_rogals@kmworld.com paul_rosenlund@kmworld.com andy_moore@verizon.net

For more information on the companies who contributed to this white paper, visit their Web sites or contact them directly:

www.kmworld.com

Content Analyst Company, LLC11720 Sunrise Valley Drive, 4th FloorReston VA 20191

PH: 800.863.0156 or 703.391.8700FAX: 703.391.1644E-mail: info@contentanalyst.comWeb: http://www.contentanalyst.com

Ektron, Inc.5 Northern Blvd, Bldg. 6Amherst NH 03031

PH: 603.594.0249FAX: 603.594.0258E-mail: info@ektron.comWeb: http://www.ektron.com

EMC CorporationDocumentum Office6801 Koll Center ParkwayPleasanton CA 94566

PH: 925.600.6800FAX: 925.600.6850E-mail: salesinfo@documentum.comWeb: http://www.documentum.com

First Consulting Group300 Atrium DriveSomerset NJ 08873

PH: 866.287.3792 or +44.174.558.2600FAX: 732.748.4401E-mail: jklein@fcg.comWeb: http://www.fcg.com

Hummingbird Ltd.1 Sparks AvenueToronto ON M2H 2W1

PH: 877.FLY.HUMM or 416.496.2200FAX: 416.496.2207E-mail: getinfo@hummingbird.comWeb: http://www.hummingbird.com

Hyland Software, Inc.28500 Clemens RoadWestlake OH 44145

PH: 440.788.5000FAX: 440.788.5100E-mail: hyland@onbase.comWeb: http://www.onbase.com

Arbortext, Inc.1000 Victors WayAnn Arbor MI 48108

PH: 734.997.0200FAX: 734.997.0201E-mail: info@arbortext.comWeb: http://www.arbortext.com

PaperThin, Inc.300 Congress St, Ste 303Quincy MA 02169

PH: 617.471.4440FAX: 617.471.4465E-mail: info@paperthin.comWeb: http://www.paperthin.com

Percussion Software600 Unicorn Park DriveWoburn MA 01801

PH: 800.283.0800 or 781.438.9900FAX: 781.438.9955E-mail: questions@percussion.comWeb: http://www.percussion.com

ScanSoft, Inc.9 Centennial DrivePeabody MA 01960

PH: 800.443.7077 or 978.977.2000FAX: 978.977.2412E-mail: info@scansoft.comWeb: http://www.scansoft.com

Stellent, Inc.7777 Golden Triangle DriveEden Prairie MN 55344

PH: 800.989.8774 or 952.903.2000FAX: 952.829.5424Web: http://www.stellent.com

ZyLAB North America LLC1577 Spring Hill Road, Suite 420Vienna VA 22182

PH: 866.995.2262FAX: 703.991.2508E-mail: info@zylab.comWeb: http://www.zylab.com

Interwoven Inc.803 11th AvenueSunnyvale CA 94089

PH: 888.468.3796FAX: 408.774.2002E-mail: info@interwoven.comWeb: http://www.interwoven.com

LexisNexisPO Box 933Dayton OH 45401-0933

PH: 937.865.6800Toll Free: 800.227.9597Web: http://www.lexisnexis.com

Open Text Corporation185 Columbia St. WestWaterloo ON N2L 5Z5

PH: 800.499.6544 or 519.888.7111FAX: 519.888.0677E-mail: info@opentext.comWeb: http://www.opentext.com